Hi guys,
My prints are for work and the designs are proprietary; however I still wanted to share some microscopic views of the prints. I took the images using my employer’s Keyance VHX-2000 digital microscope.
1.) At a low magnification level (ie: 20X magnification) it APPEARS that the grain of the material is vertical. That’s really strange since the layers are horizontal. -> Image_00.jpg
2.) Increasing to 100x magnification near an “arch” generated for supports -> Image_01.jpg
3.) The Keyance microscope takes multiple images and varying distances to generate a 3D model. -> Image_02.jpg
4.) The vertical sections of the support are interesting… You see these layers about every 0.75mm or so. I don’t really know why, but it does… Also, if seems like after about 75mm layers or so, it has the potential to get joggled out of position or something. This seems to be specific to the supports and doesn’t happen to the actual printed parts (I don’t think). -> Image_03.jpg, Image_04.jpg, Image_05.jpg
5.) If you look at Image_00.jpg, I zoomed in to the slope between the touch points (? I guess they’re called). This area is interesting later on… -> Image_06.jpg
6.) The material seems to be not rated to a high temperature, but… I wanted to check. So I put it in thermal shock. The thermal shock equipment moves the parts between an upper chamber at 150°C to the lower chamber at -40°C. This is pretty normal for validation in the automotive industry. I only did 48 cycles which is nothing – typically, we do 1060 cycles for the “real deal” --> Image_07.jpg (Note, sorry it is tilting the image of the thermal shock oven. It should be vertical)
7.) The results? The material actually did pretty well!!! It yellowed, but that’s about it. --> Image_08.jpg
