Thank you for contributing such useful and scientific nformstion to us all. I just started printing with PETG for the first time yesterday and find all this fascinating. I’d never heard of microwave drying, but live in such a dry climate I question if I even need the dryer I have.
Wow! That's an EXCELLENT precision! I have a 5kg scale but the precision is 2g... It doesn't help AT ALL for measuring humidity differences. Great stuff Igor! Thanks!
I just finished watching - Wow, microwave can be interesting if we are in a hurry... Nice tip, that we need to do it 30 seconds at a time. (And not forget that BambuLab ones have the tag). I saw once a filament spool that had screws holding both sides together... That is certainly a No No for microwave!
I dry everything in the microwave, :) works great and is 20X faster in my experience as well, Have had no issues with overheating (800w) 30-60sec with PETG or PLA you can also leave the desiccant on top of the spool to reuse it, it becomes useless really fast unless in a vacuum.
I print in the edge of the jungle and humidity is a big issue. Petg gets dried for six hours right out of the box and then we feed out of a filament dryer. The idea of a microwave is intriguing! Would shorten up initial drying times or if a roll was left out too long before going in a vacuum bag. Great video!
@@ericmary1338 in theory you never need any container as long as the filament stays warmer than the surrounding air. Depending on the % of relative humidity you can do short or longer prints without putting the filament in a dryer, since the heat is on the inside it pushes out the humidity during printing.
@@yagoaActually, at any given temperature, there’ll be an equilibrium point between the moisture in the filament and that in the air that will vary as a function of temperature. If the filament is only slightly warmer, the equilibrium point will be only slightly different than the situation when everything is at ambient. You’re right though, that as the filament warms up, the equilibrium shifts towards lower moisture content. The question is how strong the effect is and how long it will take for any absorbed moisture to diffuse from the interior to the surface so it can evaporate into the air. I don’t know what the relevant times and temperatures might be, and it might take quite a while for the moisture to diffuse away. It raises the interesting question, though, of whether a relatively short heated chamber just before the printer might be sufficient to drive off the moisture even if the filament on the spool was relatively wet.
@@yagoa considering we often print in tamps of 100F and humidity of 90%and higher I think I'll stick with my current system which we know works! It's not easy getting filament to us and we make critical items so we don't like to experiment much!
For removing sticky residue you can use regular cooking oil (or any type of fat) - just soak it in for a couple of minutes then wipe it away, the oils break down the adhesive and it's a lot easier to remove than even with IPA. Great video, too! Very informative.
I'm really intrigued by the microwave drying technique and would love a whole video about it ! I always dry my PETGs, TPUs, Nylon PA12 for hours before printing and it makes the logistics of printing and changing between filaments more complex. Bypassing all that with 1min of microwave sounds extremely attractive.
Another very interesting and well thought-out video, thanks! I particularly liked the part about the curve fit, to be able to determine the ultimate dry weight, I’m going to experiment with that myself. (You had precise 1-hour measurement intervals, but as long as you have the times of measurement as x-values, you could fit to a scatter plot. (You’d still need some significant number of data points to have a good confidence interval, but it’s an extremely useful method for determining exact moisture percentage.) Microwave drying was a revelation to me as well. Most microwaves let you set power levels in 10% increments, using what’s basically very a slow PWM, so they’ll essentially do the heat-then-pause process doe you. It strikes me that an hour at 10% power might do a very thorough job of drying, much faster and probably using less overall power than a conventional dryer. Thanks for another exceptionally *useful* video!
Wow, I'm very interested in microwave drying. Could you do a video on it's effectiveness? On what kind of filaments does it work and what timing do you recommend? How much faster is it than a dryer? These would be some interesting questions to answer!
I have a video recommendation. I would love to see you compare PETG-CF by the brands Tinmorry, Eryone, IEMAI, and Voxelab/Flashforge. They are all affordable and are known to print very easily. Most people call them a cheat code for easy good looking prints. I have a lot of friends who swear by Tinmorry and I personally have Voxelab and Eryone. The Voxelab, which is the same as Flashforge, prints very easy and has a super even almost sparkly finish. The Eryone ends up slightly rougher for me, but looks fantastic, almost metallic, and the layer ashesion may be the best of any filament I have tried. It will rip across the layer lines before it rips along them I don't even understand it. All of the pictures of Tinmorry prints I have seen look phenomenal. IEMAI also has good ratings and the company is selling a lot of interesting filaments. I think PETG-CF is getting more popular and I don't think it would be a super expensive video compared to many.
Very informative as usual. Please do a microwave drying video - there would be huge interest in that video, especially if you can find a semi reliable time/power range for different filaments.
Beautiful testing process, I myself would not use the family microwave as this may contaminate any food placed in the microwave after tinkering around with filaments in the microwave. Maybe a alternate microwave used only for my hobbies would be a better choice for me. The Vevor Scale though is pretty impressive thank you for sharing your time the process and results.
The problem may be that PETG is more permeable to water vapour than liquid water. This is a common effect, the water molecules are much more mobile as a vapour. This is how RTV silicones cures but is waterproof. Also the way that Gore-Tex works. It would be better, but take longer, to leave it in a warm humid atmosphere,
My concern in using the microwave to dry the spools is that, by locally transferring energy to the water molecules inside the filament (without uniformly heating the polymeric part as a whole), the integrity of the filament might be compromised when the moisture escapes
I think it depends on how much energy you’re putting into the water molecules. Too much and they’d actually exert pressure on the plastic’s structure (I don’t know if you’d have to get them to the point of being steam to do this or not, but staying well below that point would seem important.) As long as you’re not putting too much energy into the water molecules, all you’re doing is increasing their mobility within the plastic matrix, meaning increased diffusivity. Actually, the thermal coupling between the water molecules and plastic matrix should be very good, as they’d transfer their energy to the plastic pretty quickly. The filament temperature while microwaving should be a pretty good proxy for the energy level of the water molecules themselves. I don’t have any actual data on potential effects, but this rather hand-waving argument leaves me feeling OK about gentle microwaving for drying. (Thanks for posing the question, it was a good one to ask and I’m glad it promoted me to think through the issue this way.)
A microwave may be the key to vacuum drying if you can make your chamber and valve all plastic. I've kinda assumed I'd use a heat lamp to pump energy through the vacuum, but water sure likes 2.4ghz. Like others have mentioned, setting your microwave lower could provide automatic cycling and let you run a longer cycle.
Caveat: I wondered if Carbon Fiber filament would spark in the microwave, so googled that. Saw lots of studies, which means it doesn't spark, but isn't so straight forward due to reflectivity. Tried a print in the microwave along with some water and an ABS print. A random corner of the CF nylon print completely melted, so I think the CF is causing some resonance. The ABS (no cf) was unaffected. So not sure if it's worth trying since most of what I care about is in CF.
@@rcrdps8144 CF behaves as a thermal resistance, it heats up very quickly. About the sparks, most of the fibres are embedded in matrix, therefore they can't oxidise, which would produce the sparks
Igor is it possible that you check the 500g calibration weight on your analytical scale at work? So we can see how accurate this one is, (i know the sample size of one is really small but its a nice indicator what is possible for this price)
I think it would be more interesting to have realistic conditions (like when the spool was stored in a 50-65% humidity room). Would be interesting to see, how long it makes sense to try, before there's almost no change anymore.
The scale looks really nice for the price, It should also have a interface, is this true? "It includes a built-in leveling bubble to help operators level the balance easily. The RS232C interface design facilitates easy connection to printers and computers for data transfer."
6:46 There seems to be a lot of water inbetween the filament, so it drops out while rotating. So the initial measurement of the wet spool was distorted by that.
@@MyTechFun Ah, good to know. Still I'd be interested in a test with a spool, which was just laying around in a room with 50-65% humidity. I ask myself, how long it makes sense to dry such a spool. Also I ask myself, how much longer does it take to dry passively by putting the filament in an air-tight container together with enough completely dry silicagel.
what would be useful is how much a spool weighs from the packing, how much it gains after a couple of days, weeks etc and how much time it takes to remove that moisture from the spool when drying. Most people wouldn’t put a spool into water like that. 😂
the moisture limit for PET,( not PETG) in order to have the best mechanical performance sits around 40ppm( 0.004% H2O) but surely below 100ppm(0.01%). For other ,materials like polyamides( Nylons) the greater the carbon chain the more forgiving the material is, being Nylon 6 one of the less forgiving and Nylon 12 one of the most. TPUs the same. As a general rule, moisture content should be ideally zero, but as that is not feasible anything below 200ppm is ok. In the case of PETG, the extra diol part makes the polymer more forgiving, sacrificing some of the mechanical properties of PET, for something more elastomeric, but less moisture sensitive. If you don't want moisture issues, use PP.... This comment is intended as general info, I don't pretend to delve into something that needs to be looked in a material by material case individually
Well. The Microwave is not a good idea. keep in mind. 1 gram of water creates 1.67 liter of steam. So if the filament is "saturated" inside. The microwave will "explosively " turn water to steam and therefore break open the surface and ruin your filament. I don't even think that putting filament inside water will really saturate the Material like moist air do. Plastics are mostly "water tight" but not gas tight. Which means water in its fluid form can not penetrate into it this deep. Humidity in Air can. Or am I wrong? So to find out if Filament is hydroscopic you should better put it in a Steamy Air like over boiling water or something similar. I think then you also would not get this fast drying rate. But it could also be that I am totally wrong about this...
The water and ambient moister gets wicked into the filament structure as in between the polymer molecules. When the plastic melts at the nozzle, the liquid water flashes into tiny vapor bombs inside the nozzle where, at best, the pressure builds up during travel moves, leaving behind strings. At worst, the micro explosion leave bubbles on the print weakening the part you print.
Even if there isn’t enough moisture to flash into vapor and cause voids in the plastic, even small amounts of moisture change the physical properties of the plastic. Even slightly damp PETG will string horribly, well before the point that you’d see it “spitting” at the nozzle.
I don’t think the water is present as liquid water in the filament, more likely weakly bonded to the plastic as molecules. Either way it causes effects like stringing and if really bad it can expand and cause voids that push molten filament out unevenly
In short: Vevor is cheating!! (a little, but still - details below) Don't get me wrong, it's still a great scale, especially for the price, but it's not lab equipment. I have a slightly larger version of this scale, weighing up to 5kg with an accuracy of 0.01g, and unfortunately I noticed that Vevor is cheating a bit - their software has some kind of compensation, around popular values (e.g. 100g, 200g, 500g, 2kg - popular calibration values) the scale aligns itself with them. You can even see it in your video - after calibration, when you put the calibration weight back on for testing, the scale shows 200.03 for a moment, then the value slowly drops to exactly 200g. It's similar with other values, even after the indication - for example, I put a 100g weight on the scale, it aligns with it, then I add 0.07g and after a while the scale shows 100 again (I can do this even several times and the scale always returns to the exact value). The compensation works up to about 0.1g, maybe 0.15. If you put, for example, 200.2g on the scale immediately, this value will remain, it will not return to exactly 200. Additionally, with my version there is one more problem - above about 1.2-1.4kg the scale can cheat by about 0.2-0.3g, I don't know exactly at which point it resets. It's still a great scale as a kitchen scale, especially for the price, but such compensation definitely disqualifies it as a laboratory scale.
![VENEZUELA vs. ARGENTINA [1-1] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 9](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/SJfoPdeOPCQ/mqdefault.jpg)
this is one of my most favorite channels on youtube
Thank you for contributing such useful and scientific nformstion to us all. I just started printing with PETG for the first time yesterday and find all this fascinating. I’d never heard of microwave drying, but live in such a dry climate I question if I even need the dryer I have.
This was a nice change from your normal stuff. Thanks for sharing.
Wow! That's an EXCELLENT precision! I have a 5kg scale but the precision is 2g... It doesn't help AT ALL for measuring humidity differences. Great stuff Igor! Thanks!
I just finished watching - Wow, microwave can be interesting if we are in a hurry... Nice tip, that we need to do it 30 seconds at a time. (And not forget that BambuLab ones have the tag). I saw once a filament spool that had screws holding both sides together... That is certainly a No No for microwave!
I dry everything in the microwave, :)
works great and is 20X faster in my experience as well,
Have had no issues with overheating (800w) 30-60sec with PETG or PLA
you can also leave the desiccant on top of the spool to reuse it, it becomes useless really fast unless in a vacuum.
Good to know. I wanted to try only with nylon, but maybe I will try PETG too. Thx
I print in the edge of the jungle and humidity is a big issue. Petg gets dried for six hours right out of the box and then we feed out of a filament dryer. The idea of a microwave is intriguing! Would shorten up initial drying times or if a roll was left out too long before going in a vacuum bag. Great video!
@@ericmary1338 in theory you never need any container as long as the filament stays warmer than the surrounding air.
Depending on the % of relative humidity you can do short or longer prints without putting the filament in a dryer,
since the heat is on the inside it pushes out the humidity during printing.
@@yagoaActually, at any given temperature, there’ll be an equilibrium point between the moisture in the filament and that in the air that will vary as a function of temperature. If the filament is only slightly warmer, the equilibrium point will be only slightly different than the situation when everything is at ambient.
You’re right though, that as the filament warms up, the equilibrium shifts towards lower moisture content. The question is how strong the effect is and how long it will take for any absorbed moisture to diffuse from the interior to the surface so it can evaporate into the air.
I don’t know what the relevant times and temperatures might be, and it might take quite a while for the moisture to diffuse away. It raises the interesting question, though, of whether a relatively short heated chamber just before the printer might be sufficient to drive off the moisture even if the filament on the spool was relatively wet.
@@yagoa considering we often print in tamps of 100F and humidity of 90%and higher I think I'll stick with my current system which we know works! It's not easy getting filament to us and we make critical items so we don't like to experiment much!
For removing sticky residue you can use regular cooking oil (or any type of fat) - just soak it in for a couple of minutes then wipe it away, the oils break down the adhesive and it's a lot easier to remove than even with IPA.
Great video, too! Very informative.
I'm really intrigued by the microwave drying technique and would love a whole video about it !
I always dry my PETGs, TPUs, Nylon PA12 for hours before printing and it makes the logistics of printing and changing between filaments more complex. Bypassing all that with 1min of microwave sounds extremely attractive.
Another very interesting and well thought-out video, thanks!
I particularly liked the part about the curve fit, to be able to determine the ultimate dry weight, I’m going to experiment with that myself. (You had precise 1-hour measurement intervals, but as long as you have the times of measurement as x-values, you could fit to a scatter plot. (You’d still need some significant number of data points to have a good confidence interval, but it’s an extremely useful method for determining exact moisture percentage.)
Microwave drying was a revelation to me as well. Most microwaves let you set power levels in 10% increments, using what’s basically very a slow PWM, so they’ll essentially do the heat-then-pause process doe you. It strikes me that an hour at 10% power might do a very thorough job of drying, much faster and probably using less overall power than a conventional dryer.
Thanks for another exceptionally *useful* video!
Wow, I'm very interested in microwave drying. Could you do a video on it's effectiveness? On what kind of filaments does it work and what timing do you recommend? How much faster is it than a dryer? These would be some interesting questions to answer!
I have a video recommendation. I would love to see you compare PETG-CF by the brands Tinmorry, Eryone, IEMAI, and Voxelab/Flashforge. They are all affordable and are known to print very easily. Most people call them a cheat code for easy good looking prints. I have a lot of friends who swear by Tinmorry and I personally have Voxelab and Eryone. The Voxelab, which is the same as Flashforge, prints very easy and has a super even almost sparkly finish. The Eryone ends up slightly rougher for me, but looks fantastic, almost metallic, and the layer ashesion may be the best of any filament I have tried. It will rip across the layer lines before it rips along them I don't even understand it. All of the pictures of Tinmorry prints I have seen look phenomenal. IEMAI also has good ratings and the company is selling a lot of interesting filaments. I think PETG-CF is getting more popular and I don't think it would be a super expensive video compared to many.
Those Vevor scales are amazing 👍 I must order one.
Very informative as usual. Please do a microwave drying video - there would be huge interest in that video, especially if you can find a semi reliable time/power range for different filaments.
I am new to this hobby and I am glad I found your channel! Your videos are brilliant! I could only imagine what IQ you must have!
Beautiful testing process, I myself would not use the family microwave as this may contaminate any food placed in the microwave after tinkering around with filaments in the microwave. Maybe a alternate microwave used only for my hobbies would be a better choice for me. The Vevor Scale though is pretty impressive thank you for sharing your time the process and results.
Awesome idea (the microwave). I'll have to do some testing with the power options. I know it's still 100% power but short bursts (automatically).
The problem may be that PETG is more permeable to water vapour than liquid water. This is a common effect, the water molecules are much more mobile as a vapour. This is how RTV silicones cures but is waterproof. Also the way that Gore-Tex works. It would be better, but take longer, to leave it in a warm humid atmosphere,
My concern in using the microwave to dry the spools is that, by locally transferring energy to the water molecules inside the filament (without uniformly heating the polymeric part as a whole), the integrity of the filament might be compromised when the moisture escapes
I think it depends on how much energy you’re putting into the water molecules. Too much and they’d actually exert pressure on the plastic’s structure (I don’t know if you’d have to get them to the point of being steam to do this or not, but staying well below that point would seem important.)
As long as you’re not putting too much energy into the water molecules, all you’re doing is increasing their mobility within the plastic matrix, meaning increased diffusivity.
Actually, the thermal coupling between the water molecules and plastic matrix should be very good, as they’d transfer their energy to the plastic pretty quickly. The filament temperature while microwaving should be a pretty good proxy for the energy level of the water molecules themselves.
I don’t have any actual data on potential effects, but this rather hand-waving argument leaves me feeling OK about gentle microwaving for drying.
(Thanks for posing the question, it was a good one to ask and I’m glad it promoted me to think through the issue this way.)
A microwave may be the key to vacuum drying if you can make your chamber and valve all plastic. I've kinda assumed I'd use a heat lamp to pump energy through the vacuum, but water sure likes 2.4ghz. Like others have mentioned, setting your microwave lower could provide automatic cycling and let you run a longer cycle.
Caveat: I wondered if Carbon Fiber filament would spark in the microwave, so googled that. Saw lots of studies, which means it doesn't spark, but isn't so straight forward due to reflectivity. Tried a print in the microwave along with some water and an ABS print. A random corner of the CF nylon print completely melted, so I think the CF is causing some resonance. The ABS (no cf) was unaffected. So not sure if it's worth trying since most of what I care about is in CF.
@@rcrdps8144 CF behaves as a thermal resistance, it heats up very quickly. About the sparks, most of the fibres are embedded in matrix, therefore they can't oxidise, which would produce the sparks
Just wondering whether the defrost mode of the microwave (especially if you have a mode for frozen pastry) wouldn't be better for drying filament?
Igor is it possible that you check the 500g calibration weight on your analytical scale at work?
So we can see how accurate this one is, (i know the sample size of one is really small but its a nice indicator what is possible for this price)
Lighter fluid is the best thing for those stickers
Hello, do you have any video on flexible PLA? Im having severe layer adhesion problems. I can strip the layers apart with mininum pulling force.
I think it would be more interesting to have realistic conditions (like when the spool was stored in a 50-65% humidity room).
Would be interesting to see, how long it makes sense to try, before there's almost no change anymore.
The scale looks really nice for the price,
It should also have a interface, is this true?
"It includes a built-in leveling bubble to help operators level the balance easily. The RS232C interface design facilitates easy connection to printers and computers for data transfer."
6:46 There seems to be a lot of water inbetween the filament, so it drops out while rotating.
So the initial measurement of the wet spool was distorted by that.
7:05 Also there's still a lot of water in the dryer while drying, which will influence the process.
I removed that water after the 1st hour measuring. And that's why I exclude the first point.
@@MyTechFun Ah, good to know.
Still I'd be interested in a test with a spool, which was just laying around in a room with 50-65% humidity.
I ask myself, how long it makes sense to dry such a spool.
Also I ask myself, how much longer does it take to dry passively by putting the filament in an air-tight container together with enough completely dry silicagel.
You are the best.
Better than all the rest
what would be useful is how much a spool weighs from the packing, how much it gains after a couple of days, weeks etc and how much time it takes to remove that moisture from the spool when drying.
Most people wouldn’t put a spool into water like that. 😂
the moisture limit for PET,( not PETG) in order to have the best mechanical performance sits around 40ppm( 0.004% H2O) but surely below 100ppm(0.01%). For other ,materials like polyamides( Nylons) the greater the carbon chain the more forgiving the material is, being Nylon 6 one of the less forgiving and Nylon 12 one of the most. TPUs the same. As a general rule, moisture content should be ideally zero, but as that is not feasible anything below 200ppm is ok. In the case of PETG, the extra diol part makes the polymer more forgiving, sacrificing some of the mechanical properties of PET, for something more elastomeric, but less moisture sensitive. If you don't want moisture issues, use PP.... This comment is intended as general info, I don't pretend to delve into something that needs to be looked in a material by material case individually
I've started using an air fryer to dry filament.
Well. The Microwave is not a good idea. keep in mind. 1 gram of water creates 1.67 liter of steam. So if the filament is "saturated" inside. The microwave will "explosively " turn water to steam and therefore break open the surface and ruin your filament.
I don't even think that putting filament inside water will really saturate the Material like moist air do. Plastics are mostly "water tight" but not gas tight. Which means water in its fluid form can not penetrate into it this deep. Humidity in Air can. Or am I wrong?
So to find out if Filament is hydroscopic you should better put it in a Steamy Air like over boiling water or something similar.
I think then you also would not get this fast drying rate.
But it could also be that I am totally wrong about this...
Ok, I was wrong. Put it in water is equal to 100% Humidity. (DIN EN ISO 62) Sorry.
So the filament hits the hotend at 180c plus - how could a couple of % moisture ever impact the prints? The filament melts inside the hotend….
The water turns into steam and it push out the material (the material then looks like Aerated chocolate).
The water and ambient moister gets wicked into the filament structure as in between the polymer molecules.
When the plastic melts at the nozzle, the liquid water flashes into tiny vapor bombs inside the nozzle where, at best, the pressure builds up during travel moves, leaving behind strings. At worst, the micro explosion leave bubbles on the print weakening the part you print.
Even if there isn’t enough moisture to flash into vapor and cause voids in the plastic, even small amounts of moisture change the physical properties of the plastic. Even slightly damp PETG will string horribly, well before the point that you’d see it “spitting” at the nozzle.
once you start 3d printing you will see for yourself :)
I don’t think the water is present as liquid water in the filament, more likely weakly bonded to the plastic as molecules. Either way it causes effects like stringing and if really bad it can expand and cause voids that push molten filament out unevenly
💦
In short: Vevor is cheating!! (a little, but still - details below)
Don't get me wrong, it's still a great scale, especially for the price, but it's not lab equipment. I have a slightly larger version of this scale, weighing up to 5kg with an accuracy of 0.01g, and unfortunately I noticed that Vevor is cheating a bit - their software has some kind of compensation, around popular values (e.g. 100g, 200g, 500g, 2kg - popular calibration values) the scale aligns itself with them. You can even see it in your video - after calibration, when you put the calibration weight back on for testing, the scale shows 200.03 for a moment, then the value slowly drops to exactly 200g. It's similar with other values, even after the indication - for example, I put a 100g weight on the scale, it aligns with it, then I add 0.07g and after a while the scale shows 100 again (I can do this even several times and the scale always returns to the exact value). The compensation works up to about 0.1g, maybe 0.15. If you put, for example, 200.2g on the scale immediately, this value will remain, it will not return to exactly 200.
Additionally, with my version there is one more problem - above about 1.2-1.4kg the scale can cheat by about 0.2-0.3g, I don't know exactly at which point it resets. It's still a great scale as a kitchen scale, especially for the price, but such compensation definitely disqualifies it as a laboratory scale.