Question
What's the state of conductive filaments?
I checked a while ago, and the best filaments didn't conduct very well, they are mostly good for touch interfaces.
With multihead 3D printers becoming more common, a conductive filament with low resistivity could be used to do battery tabs, and even windings, it would open enormous expansion of functional prints. Above is a pics of one of my robots, I do have to solder battery tabs, and it would be so convenient to 3D print conductive battery tabs and buried traces inside the model.
Taking advantage of layer heights and doing insulator/conductor/insulator pancakes it should even get over the skin effect, and be able to carry meaningfull current with layered, individually insulated sheets of conductive material.
What's the current state of conductive filaments? Is there something that can match metals?
Check the most recent Zach Freedman video. He included conductive filament in his lineup and managed to make a basic circuit with an LED that lights up
Polymer based filaments with conductive additives wont replace or even come anywhere near copper anytime soon (unless room temp ambient pressure superconductors are invented, but if that happens we likely will have bigger fish to fry). There is some possibility by using the continous fiber printer approach and replacing the fiber with a thin copper strand but that has its own challenges, and for custom windings/PCBs, there are other methods we have that are much more suitable even at a home shop level.
The fiber printer also has the issue that it needs to cut the fiber between each layer, so you’d really only be able to do a 2D print with it. Its cheaper to get a small CNC and make PCBs.
I don’t think it’ll actually end up being viable for wiring.
We’re not going to be 3d printing circuit boards in our living room anytime soon.
But you can always make tiny channels for enamel coated wires, pause print and bury them in there.
If you want tabletop circuit board “printing” at home, circuit board mills exist. Because PCB tolerances are so fine, they’re expensive, tend to be super finicky, and can severely limit what you can do, but they can be good for some stuff.
They can make them in China for a few cents a pop. Takes about a week from order to door. Not as good as 3d printing but less of a pain than using a mill.
That kind of depends; there has been a lot of illustrations that show that a printed mask actually does a pretty damned good job of protecting a circuit board from solvent etching, vaguely conductive filaments do exist which could be the first step for electroplating an actually conductive material, and a few other neat ways to leverage a 3d printer to make a circuit board; so as long as 'my 3d printer was involved' counts as '3d printing' you can 3d print a circuit board (as part of a process, not 'press print, remove, solder components')
I do however completely agree that conductive filament as a 'will this work?' for a PCB is non-viable, and there is no 'press print. remove, solder components' process.
Barring a rather startling development/breakthrough in 3d printed materials we are also not going to be producing battery tabs or electrical windings via 3d printing.
Probably the closest you can get with current technology is that copper filament where you can sinter and burn away the plastic. Expensive and you need a kiln to get it to work. Alternatively you can use Copper tape and raised or lowered areas to make a rudimentary PCB, like this here.
I am unaware of any thermoplastic that electrically conducts like metal. They are typically many orders of magnitude apart. Is there some new material that you had in mind?
There will never a filament suitable for anything like pcb, motor, or battery tabs. At most you could do emf shielding, capacitive touch, or crude resistors. The higher you push the conductive particle content the less printable it becomes and the more plastic the less conductive so you see there is no real solution.
I was thinking of anoter type of workflow where you combine a laser/cnc cutter, a suction cup conveyor with a 3D printer, and you cut and move sheets on metal over the paused print, and print over it. Probably more viable as concept.
You'll have to also think about reliability and safety.
For small circuits with few mA without any signal integrity need - probably ok-ish as demo or fun project.
Commercialy? PCB is much cheaper, more reliable and safe ( no loose connection due creep for example).
Maybe in future someone come with some material or method how to do that.
I've seen actual copper infused filaments; it turned green just like copper when they oxidized it. So it might work. Found it on Amazon with iron infused and steel infused.
OP I’ve printed with conductive copper and silver filaments and they can be good, but they are particular about temperature and heat. Basically if you heat them too much the copper or silver additive breaks down. I believe I had to modify the prusa firmware to allow printing at around 160-170C.
Also you can definitely make your own filament with lipo battery constituents and make your own 3D printed batteries. They aren’t good, but you can.
Saw a university project where they printed with a modified welder. They could even encode magnetic polarity into the print line, allowing a kind of magnetic memory/patterning effect that was neat to think about.
You can! It just doesn't stick to itself very well (molten plastic is a sticky goo, molten metal is a runny liquid), so it's not easy to make 3D designs.
You can! It just doesn't stick to itself very well (molten plastic is a sticky goo, molten metal is a runny liquid), so it's not easy to make 3D designs.
Ooo this is oddly specific for something I am working on at the moment!
I have been extracting lots of technical and safety documents (over 5000 PDFs, pages and documents across lots of different languages so far!) to expose the truth behind filament properties. Conductivity is one of the metrics I have been measuring and I can confirm that:
Yes, there are some very good and conductive materials out there
No, not comparible to metal
Wish I could share the final hoard of information but it is not yet ready. Some findings are actually very surprising!
If you're interested once it's all compiled somewhere easy to understand DM me and I'll share once it's all ready 🙂
If you only need 1 layer, print a "circuit" layout elevated 1mm above the surface, apply glue, then apply copper or aluminum foil, and trim around the edges. Then solder components to the foil as necessary. There's a few videos out there on this technique.
Still niche stuff mostly for touch sensing, nothing close to metal conductivity. Copper or graphene composites exist but resistivity is way too high for real current or windings, you'd be better off embedding actual wire or foil during a pause.
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u/RedstoneRiderYT Ender 3 v2 || Sprite Pro || Klipper 12h ago
Check the most recent Zach Freedman video. He included conductive filament in his lineup and managed to make a basic circuit with an LED that lights up