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Filament dryers from Digicolor work with the dry air process and are suitable for industrial drying of filaments. This type of filament drying is directly upstream of additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing, also commonly known as 3D printing, is the manufacture of components by adding material in layers.
The FDM (Fused Deposition Manufacturing) and FFF (Fused Filament Fabrication) processes are widespread. In this process, workpieces are built up in layers from a meltable plastic. In addition to plastic granules, the usual form of administration of the starting materials is wire-shaped wound plastic strands – the so-called filaments.
The moisture content in the plastic filament has a direct impact on the quality of the printed end product. This material moisture is thus a quality-relevant parameter, just as it is in granulate processing, e.g. the injection moulding or extrusion process.
For this reason, based on decades of experience with dry air dryers, Digicolor developed a special filament dryer that is able to dry plastic filaments in a suitable manner.
The filament dryer has such a modular structure that it can be integrated into various additive manufacturing processes – either as a tabletop device or as a mobile side-by-side dryer. Filament dryers from Digicolor can hold one or two filament rolls and unwind the dried plastic strands directly to the print head of the 3D printer.
Extensive material tests show that the quality of the 3D-printed products is significantly improved with this filament drying, especially with hygroscopic materials such as polyamide (PA) or polycarbonate (PC). Manufacturers of 3D printing filaments often point out in their material data sheets that, for example, PA, PC or PC-ABS filaments are hygroscopic and should therefore be stored in a dry place in order to obtain the best possible quality of the printed product after the printing process.
The drying temperature as well as the volume flow and the dew point of the drying air can be set on the dry air generator. In this way, these special drying processes can be optimized and the material-specific requirements of different filament types can be met.
With the new filament dryer, Digicolor offers a device that is designed for industrial applications of 3D printing of plastic products.
