extrudr BDP Pearl filament - experience mini-report - it shines, in a nice way  

extrudr BDP Pearl filament - experience mini-report - it shines, in a nice way

already before my mk3s kit arrived, i ordered a few spools of different filament for the fun - one of these was extrudr's BDP Pearl ( https://www.extrudr.com/en/products/catalogue/pearl-natur_2277/) promising being compostable under regular composting conditions and not only biodegradable under special conditions. also, i liked the way it looked on the spool pictures in the shops. 🙂

as prusa-slicer 2.0.0 do not have a profile ready to be used, i had to titrate the temps a bit to get it right - here i want to share the key data points and get feedback from others if they are using it too. extrudr should have another BDP filament called "Flax", which should print with same conditions, but this i did not try (the filament is about 20-30 % more expensive than other materials promising being mechanically worse, so the appeal has to be in how it looks and feels as well as the easier recycling which i still want to test at a later stage)

specs:

• on the box:           nozzle 140-210 °C | hotbed 0-60 °C | speed 60-120 mm/s
• on their website: nozzle 150-190 °C | hotbed 0-60 °C | speed 60-120 mm/s
• on my filament shop website: 170-200 °C

WTF? not even the producer can agree on settings... or maybe it got updated... ok, lets try (hotbed at 55 °C for this runs and part cooling fan 80-100 % PWM):

• 160 °C => no filament comes out the nozzle while printing starts - aborted
• 170 °C  => works fine, but slight underextrusion
• 170 °C extr 1.10 => too much
• 170 °C extr 1.05 => looks good
• 180 °C extr 1.05 => looks good, less shiny
• 190 °C extr 1.05 => looks good, even less shiny
• 200 °C extr 1.05 => less shiny, stringing?
• 210 °C extr 1.05 => stringing, bit messy at start-stop positions

then played with 2 °C steps and came to the conclusion: safe range for printing 168 °C to 196 °C to result in good prints

hotbed? everywhere it says it is not needed... hmm... so lets try reducing the temp (performed while trying to print some boxes for children's toy cubes 118 mm x 77 mm wide):

• 55 °C => corners of the box slightly lifted up slightly - warping?
• 40 °C (i did start the print before investigating the result of the 55 °C in detail) - lots of warping and shrinkage ~1 %
• 60 °C flat, no warping, no shrinkage, but first 1-2 layers bit wider than designed/sliced

conslusion:

hotbed 60 °C

nozzle temp 168-196 °C is ok. lower temps result in more shiny surfaces, above 192 shiny-ness gone

open points:

• anyone knows how to set a continuous temperature ramp across layers or regions in prusa-slicer? i want to see if the shiny-ness can be used as a design element (e.g. having a photo or text decorating a 3d structure not only in x-y-z but shinyness). not sure the nozzle temp regulation on my mk3s is fast enough for something like that though.
• i added a feature request for the i3 firmware to include a preheat-setup for BDP material (186 / 55): https://github.com/prusa3d/Prusa-Firmware/issues/2066
• should i add a feature request to include the material and profile for BDP in prusa-slicer? or are you guys contacting the filament producers directly for something like this?
• if someone wants me to test something specific and benefiting the community, i have still some material and am willing to participate - i have all nozzle sizes, but keep the print/experiment times and material amounts small if possible (i have only one printer for now and a lot of ideas and lots of different filaments 🙂 )