What would you recommend for the best material for a tube that will be used for testing high speed dust travel. My first thought was Rigid… but I would like other opinions.
Need more information to make a useful contribution.
What size / thickness it the tube? How are you connecting to the tube? Is it a visual test or measure of air-flow? How smooth does the internal bore need to be?
We have only built a few parts from Rigid resin and it is impressively ‘rigid’ and stable compared to the others; Durable, Tough etc. It is much better than the others if you need thin walls, but doesn’t slide because of the glass fibres at the surface. Durable resin lived up to the promise of sliding easily on other parts, but too flexible in thin components even after being properly cured, much better at 3mm+.
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I can’t answer all of the questions, but it’s roughly 1" diameter with .025" walls. There are some internal vanes that we are evaluating the “abrasion resistance” of the materials in comparison to other printed prototype materials. Essentially blasting air with sand through the tube to see how long it lasts.
The internal surfaces need to be smooth with no finishing needed. We’ll try some samples with Tough to start and also move to Rigid when we get some in.
I think you’re on the right track with trying Tough resin, since it sounds like you’re looking for a balance between toughness (or impact strength) and modulus for this application. I like using the diagram at the bottom of this page as a reference for our Engineering Resin properties.
We make mostly functional parts. I found the ‘Tough’ to be very poor in thin-walled parts and 0.025" (0.635mm) is very thin. Abrasion to the surface resulted in white powdering and larger thin section parts distorted under their own weight, even after thorough post-curing. 3mm walls are ideal for ‘Tough’.
Thin-walled parts in Rigid are stable and hold their shape well even before curing. I would expect it to stand up to a sand-blasting very well. Trying different resins (Grey, Tough, Durable and Rigid) gave us a good understanding of their relative merits.
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I have made parts that are about 0.75mm thick and the external dimensions were about 30x30x50mm. The part was self-supported though as it was designed for 3D printing and this is maybe why it printed and post-cured well.
Rigid is pretty much your only option…
its glass filled and the glass will be close in hardness to the sand it needs to resist.
Everything else you can print in will simply erode away… the rigid will result in a sandpaper like texture that resists erosion, and will require each particle of glass to be 70% excavated before it will break away.
Sandblasting will still cut thru it pretty quick- but rigid, by virtue of its fill, should last twice as long as any other Formlabs resin.
That’s what i was thinking too. Thank you for your input!