So a few months ago I had an idea I was sure someone had done before, but as it turns out not really. The concept relates to 3d printers part cooling and how it could be improved.
So typically a fan is used for part cooling, specifically a 4014 or 5015 typically mounted to the carrier next to the hotend. Now if you’re printing a stock profile out of the box this doesn’t really matter to you but if you’re printing fast, like 20k acceleration fast, there is a good chance the fan mounted to the carrier is causing some resonance issues.
CPAP fans are employed or a beard air cooling solution is used if they’re printing with PLA. These solutions mount the fan motors away from the carrier so that distance acts as a insulator/barrier against resonance and also provides much more output that your typical 5015.
Although cpap fans are extremely popular right now, especially for high speed this isn’t what I want to use. I’ve been testing a pond pump, repurposed for part cooling of course.
So after some preliminary testing the idea is to have one 5015 fan mounted to the rear of the carrier with the experimental pond pump cooler mounted to the front of the carrier. The 5015 would be routed to the hotend via 3d printed ducting and the air pump output would be via H.A.K(puenumatic tubing) and a copper spout to focus air flow.
The pump itself will be mounted to a shelf on the exterior of the cabinet and controlled via SSR.
So after doing some testing with the SSR and the pump, I’ve had problems controlling the airflow. First I had the SSR wired in backwards and the output for it inverted and it worked fine(I could control the output) but after I switched it over from inverted to not and fixed the wiring, all it would do is switch on/off. This is something I’m going to have to come back to.