Cannot finish print. Large piece gets stuck at the bottom of the resin tank

Hello,

I have been having issue printing a fairly large print job. First I started printing this valve in the following position with an old resin tank that I had. The print position is shown in the following picture.

image

Unfortunately this print job did not work well as we can see in the following picture. The print job stopped working about half way through.
image

Next, I tried to print it using the default positioning given by the PreForm software, hoping that the larger amount of supports would help me. The print job looks like this:
image

The end result of this was not good either. Only the supports section got printed. The final results look as follows:

image

From the evidence presented I thought that the resin tank was not working effectively. Next, I tried using a brand new resin tank with the same print settings as before. However, the results where pretty much the same as last time where only the supports section printed well. Also, I did notice in this print (as well as the others) there was a large chunk of resin in the bottom of the tank attached to the transparent section. This was obviously what was preventing my print from coming out well. I thought I would fix that with a new tank but I did not. Also I cleaned the window in the printer between the tank and the laser before my prints, so the printer should be working properly.

The details of my last trial are shown in the following pictures:



I would highly appreciate any help solving my issues

So, the first example would definitely fail–you should not orient an object to where flat surfaces are parallel to the build platform–it causes issues where a large surface doesn’t have enough support and the layer will come apart when it tries to lift the print up to print the next layer.

The automatic orientation is probably better but it’s hard to tell in the small photos what issues might be there and what can be done to improve the result. When orienting an object you want to get it so that you won’t have to use too many supports. When adding supports you need to make sure that all unsupported points have supports, and then you need to add supports to areas to create stability so that the part doesn’t flex too much as it builds up.
A few extra supports around the starting point to make the start more stable and then adding some further up and spaced out to make sure it doesn’t flex.

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Thanks for the troubleshooting you’ve done so far. Ruling our errors with the tank and attempting different orientations is always a big help.

Can you upload your .form file so that we can take a look and make sure there aren’t any unsupported features? If nothing jumps out, I’ll make sure to have someone from our team reach out so that we can help troubleshoot further.

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Thank you for your help.

Sure, I can upload the file. This is a large file so I am sending it via OneDrive

https://purdue0-my.sharepoint.com/personal/acostas_purdue_edu/_layouts/15/guestaccess.aspx?docid=1ece7c602f25d42f89722d94e0fb41e38&authkey=AdAqc5lTl5DYuD5T8PIe308

The tallest part should be oriented toward the Wiper side.
Can you hollow out the solid parts?

I cannot, but I have split the part into 2 smaller ones that I can assemble later and hopefully that will work

Your current orientation looks great and I wouldn’t expect that to be what’s causing issue here. Were you able to filter the tank after the first failure? In some cases, residual cured resin from failed prints will cause future parts to fail. If you did filter the tank between failures, you should open up a ticket with our support team so that we can help to troubleshoot further with you.

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