Here’s a possibly impossible feature request: add a filament moisture sensor to the X1C. The point would be to stop printing (or raise a warning) if the filament is not dry enough. It seems this could solve more than half the print quality issues raised in the forum, especially by beginners. I have no idea how one would engineer something like that. Maybe detect steam or measure expansion after stopping to extrude?
Not sure if that’s easily achievable. Lumber and paper mills do this but it requires penetrating the material with special probes.
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Yeah, I don’t expect it to be possible to measure the moisture content of the filament and I don’t think that would be ideal in any case. What would be more useful is to detect the negative effects of too high a moisture content, I believe that may be possible…
Theoretically if you knew the density of the cross section and had an array of sonar devices, it could ping the filament and check it’s density to see if it resembles saturated densities versus dry densities.
But that’s highly theoretical. This process is used regularly in testing equipment.
An inline moisture measurement may be complex and expensive for small-scale equipment.
Yet, it is possible by redesigning near-infrared moisture measurement devices for filament. Besides NIR, I don’t know any other secondary method that could be effectively used for filament moisture measurement. But it may exist.
The simplest and cheapest method I can imagine is comparing the filament mass with an expected value (the dry value). The filament mass can be measured using inexpensive sensors, e.g., a strain gauge, which can be added to the AMS. Assessing the expected mass does not require further instrumentation, as it is trivial to convert the filament’s remaining capacity measurement value (assuming it is accurate) into mass. It may require some calibration to improve accuracy.
The only issue is that its use will undoubtedly be restricted to their property filaments.
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I’m not sure that measuring the actual filament moisture content is that useful (even though that’s how I titled this thread). Knowing the moisture content still leaves a lot of calibrating to decide whether a value of X is a problem or not. It seems to me that measuring the effects of moisture is more useful and probably easier. If the effects can be detected then it’s clear that there’s a problem.
This probably doesn’t even need to happen continuously. For example, during the initial priming, the nozzle could dock to a sensor, extrude a small amount, and have the sensor measure some effect. If one is concerned about the spool getting wet during multi-hour prints this could be repeated every now and then.
During a print start some sort of humidity or barometric chamber could be installed to the chute to assess the amount of off gassing occurring during initial purge at startup. This may need to occur for each filament obviously, so that test could happen during filament swaps as well.