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The Principle Behind Fast Resin 3D Printing

TL;DR: There are several things you should look into when try to shorten your printing time.
  • Before you start to adjust the speed of the setting, find a stable setting as your starting point.
  • Understand your equipment and the material you are using. Choose a resin that requires lower exposing time with low viscosity, and install a releasing film that is not sticky to the cured resin. 
  • Fast printing is a result of the combination of right setting for right tools, experimenting with the setting to optimize it is necessary. Expect to spend time on this process.


    Printing fast has becoming a trending topic in Phrozen community recently. After Phrozen released a video promoting their ACF film, with the printer applied with the ACF film ended up prints 6x faster then the other one shown in the demonstration video, people are hyped about this idea.


▲ One of the posts that gets people's attention on high speed printing.

    But as you may already know, resin 3D printing is not a simple thing - at least not as simple as the adverts from 3D printer manufacturers suggest. There are lots of factors that will decide if your model is going to print out successfully or not, so does your will to print faster.

    In order to achieve shorter printing time, you have to understand what could possibility makes a print job slower than another, and how should you optimize it by various ways. This is not a tutorial or guide with steps for those who want to speed up their 3D printing process to follow, but I will try to explain the factors you have to pay attention to, while experimenting with your printing settings.


Resin

    Resin could be the most important part when it comes to 3D printing. It is the exact material of your final result, it varies from one to another, and so they will need different printing settings for them to work, sometimes even the environment would matter.

    First, let us talk about what your printer is doing spending that much time printing out a concrete object. There are three kind of things that take up times during the printing process - Exposing, Moving the building plate, and Wait for everything to be set.

    If you look into the chart of suggested printing settings from manufacturers, you will find different amount of exposure time for different resin. Take Phrozen's Aqua Gray 8K and Nylon Green Tough Resin for example: suggested exposure time for their normal layer are 1.8 ~ 2.5 seconds and 2.5 ~ 3.5 seconds respectively. That is partially because the viscosity of Nylon Green Tough Resin is much greater than Aqua Gray 8K (280~380 cP vs. 742 cP).

    This difference of viscosity between these two resin also causes Aqua Gray 8K requires shorter resting time after retract, namely 2 seconds vs. 4 seconds. It means for every time after the building plate lifted up and lowering down, your printer will takes 2 more second waiting for Nylon Green Tough Resin to get back to the place it suppose to be, ready to perform next exposure, after it has been agitated by the plate movement. 


▲ Aqua Gray 8K and Nylon Green Tough Resin settings for Sonic Mighty 8K. /Phrozen

    In short, when selecting the resin trying to print fast, you should look for those by manufacturers' suggestion, which is usually conservative - to guarantee a higher success rate for their users, is already requires shorter exposure and resting time after retract, so you will have a higher chance to get a success print with optimal details when experimenting dialling those two numbers down.


Printer

    Now, it is tricky to list down the printer here. Because it is not common that people have bought multiple printers and do comparison between them to find out the most fine discrepancies, then decide which one are they going to use. But it is still important to know that, this is a factor when you are trying to optimise your workflow.
    
    The difference we are looking for on the printers on this topic, is light intensity. Generally speaking, more intense of the light, takes lesser time to cure the resin, that is why the suggested exposure time for resin is represented as a range: to tolerate the difference between printers and using environments.

    There are two components that affects the light intensity. LCD and LED array. Both of them are consumable parts, means they will slowly degrade after usage, and the light intensity will slowly become lower that you might need to longer your exposing time. Till the end of its life, you will have to replace them. Good news is, according to an uncompleted statistic (i.e. by my personal experience 😝), they stay alive for a good length of time. But you might notice some changes on the performance side after years of daily use, and might need to adjust your settings accordingly.

    It's also important to notice that, the step motor that 3D printers are using to move the building plate also has it's limit. Users can usually set any number they want in slicing software to instruct how fast the plate should move, but the step motor can only get as fast as it can be. So you should check the spec sheet of your printer to see how fast the plate can it move.


Releasing Film

    When the resin exposes to UV light, the light will cure (harden) the resin, turning it from liquid into solid state. You will expect any object that contacts the resin being stick to the cured resin, harder the resin become, more forces you will have to apply to separate the object from the cured resin. In resin 3D printing, we are utilizing this behaviour to stick the model to the building plate, and separate it from the releasing film, where the film should be something that the resin is not tend to stick with when being cured, and easy to separate from when pulling it away, and the plate being another way around.

    Comparing ACF to PFA (nFEP) and FEP, it shows the physical characteristics being better fit to the description that we are looking for as the releasing film. For being more non-stick in contrast, ACF can endure the movement of the plate being set to a higher speed, with lower chance to experience the failure of a print job, which most likely being the model tearing apart in the middle, or being peeling off from the build plate.


▲ A diagram shows the difference between three kinds of releasing film.
Please note that it does not accurately represents the reality. /Phrozen


Summary

    3D printing is a process of facing difficulties in the process of making materials into the shape you desired, thus it is a skill that needs experiences to know what could goes wrong during the printing, and eventually being good at it so one can use their tools more handy then the others. Printing fast is a result that shows one is having a good understanding of their tools and the material they choose. They execute their decision just about right before the prints failed, so they can save some time of the process as the reward of being knowledgeable of what they are doing.

    With that being said, fast printing might not be something that you want to do with your every prints. Sometimes you don't even need to print fast, said you are only working on the model every 18 hours, after the sleep in night and finished the full-time job in day; or having 2 days away from your workshop in the weekend to spend the time with your family. There are times that didn't need to save, especially in exchange for higher chance to failed the print and reduce the lifespan of the consumer parts.

    As every other physical acts from chopping up vegetables to an engine running, there are parts that needs to be replace every once a while and the tool itself needs to be maintained, 3D printing wears out the parts every time you print stuff little by little. Printing things fast could potentially wears out those part faster especially when pushing the settings to the limit. As a member of the community once commented: There are no correct setting for 3D printing, every printer and resin have optimized setting for their own.

    Using a cheat sheet or copying settings from others might work on your printer and resin, but without knowing the principle of 3D printing and the difference you are making from changing those numbers, sometimes even risk damaging your printer for the settings not being optimized to your tools; and not being familiar with the tool, for without going through the process of experimenting and troubleshooting, it will be more difficult to points out the cause when a problem happening.


    To learn the basic of dialling in your resin, finding a starting point for your resin and printer, please check this article which documents one of our community member sharing his experiences of adjusting the settings: 

https://phrozencommunityblog.blogspot.com/2023/08/how-to-create-your-own-resin-profile.html

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