It has been the trend of recent months to upgrade the cooling duct on your 3D printer. Why should you upgrade it and what changes will you see after the upgrade? Filamentz tells more.
What does a cooling fan duct do?
On a 3D printer, a cooling fan duct is intended to cool the filament as quickly as possible, to prevent it from remaining liquid for too long, with all the consequences that entails. With a duct that works correctly, you will notice that overhanging parts can be better 3D printed, long stretches can be bridged without support and details are more visible. With the right performance, it is possible to print inclination angles greater than 45 degrees without any problems. This of course depends on the material, nozzle size and the speed at which 3D printing will take place.
Type of fans for a cooling duct
In the current 3D printing market you see that a different number of fans are used to cool prints, to the extreme. The most commonly used fans are the so-called '5015' fans. As the name suggests, these are approximately 50 x 15 mm in size and provide approximately 5.5 m3/h at a pressure of 0.0016 bar. This is generally more than sufficient when using a regular 3D printer. With larger 3D printers, these are sometimes placed parallel to each other for more volume and at extremely high speeds you see larger fans placed next to them, such as with the Voron 3D printers and the Bambulab X1 3D printers. The entire print surface is cooled with a specific fan to achieve fast movements and print speeds.
Purpose of the cooling fan duct upgrade
The ultimate goal of the upgrade is to get a cool airflow around the tip of the 3D printer nozzle, to get the liquid filament into a solid state as quickly as possible. As can be seen, the goal is to get the airflow from the fan as close as possible to the tip without cooling the heatblock enormously or getting a cool airflow on the print surface, with the risk that prints will come off prematurely. This can be calculated with CFD analyzes but can also be done with a whole range of tests.
Where can I find cooling fan duct upgrades?
Most upgrades can be found for free on the major providers of 3D models, such as Cults, Printables and Thingiverse. Because everyone benefits from better performance, most 3D printers have already been devised and are therefore relatively easy to find. However, it is good to test yourself and find out whether the cooling duct actually gives better results. Do an overhang test, a temperature tower or a model with many details and compare them with each other.