The purpose of this post is to examine the various 3D printer parameters and how they affect the print time. Since the track is a large part that uses over 150 grams of material, reducing the print time is essential. However, we do not want to sacrifice the function or quality of the track, thus we will have to find the right balance of speed and quality. We opened the track in Cura and varied numerous parameters to determine the sensitivity of each. We decided to examine the layer height, infill density, infill pattern, and print speed since these are some of the most important parameters with regards to speed and quality. The part can only be printed in one direction, thus the orientation will not be examined. We printed our initial prototype of the track which took over 15 hours. While the settings used to print the prototype will be described in more detail in the future, we wanted to make a quick note of what was used. An Ultimaker 3 was used to print our track prototype using turquoise PLA. Additionally, the print parameters used were a layer height of 0.25 mm, an infill density of 20%, a grid infill pattern, and a print speed of 100 mm/s. Since this part was already completed, we will use these values as the baseline. The rest of the sensitivity results are summarized in Table 1.
As can be seen in the table, the print length is most sensitive to the layer height and print speed. The least sensitive parameter was the infill patterns and density. This is logical as the track does not have a lot of thick parts that would require infill. While we chose the parameters that we thought would give us the best quality print, if we wanted to speed up the print we could increase the print speed and layer height.