Filament dryers to work on the ams unit

with all the builds I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone take the lid off the ams unit and model brackets for sunlu filament dryers so ams feeds in and out of them

I bet money you didn’t think it through logically before posting it

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Why? That will be 10% by morning, just replaced the desiccant and loaded a couple of different spools.

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@joejoe

The dessicant can remove moisture from the air to slow down how waterlogged the filament gets, but it cannot reverse that and cannot dry the filament, and so the moisture level in the filament will gradually increase. A dryer will heat the filament to force the water out of it by evaporation.

You may feel the dessicant is sufficent, and it might be if you live in a dry region, use the filament quickly, and have a type that is more water-resistant, but I have to dry filament and find dessicant insufficient on its own.

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desiccant keeps things dry but it doesnt dry them.

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I understand that desiccant won’t dry filament, which is why I also have a Sunlu filament dryer.

My filament is either dry and ready for printing (in which case it is in the AMS or a vacuum bag with desiccant) or in the filament drier (in which case it is not ready for printing). I don’t understand why you would feed filament that needs drying into your printer or store dry filament in a dryer when the AMS is excellent at that.

im just saying there is alot of ■■■■ people make that just doesnt seem very logical and surprised havent seen this one yet haha

what happens to recoil in the unmotorized sunlu spool, a birds nest is what happens.

and…it was your first post, I just couldn’t…I guess I should remember even folks who have zero mechanical thought processes need to 3d print too. I apologize, the AMS uses CAM software and hardware to move a spool roller in the bottom of the AMS, your sunlu filament toaster does not include any mounting space for a port over, and then comes the heat issue as it’s an active dryer it actively heats the filament and the BamBu products (thinking PCB’s and plastic gears and magnets) that weren’t created to work in that environment. Not saying it can’t be built and engineered but even cannibalizing both products to Frankenstein something could be done but the heating element is still an issue though.

You must not live in the tropics :slight_smile:

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Close enough, east Texas. When it is 75F outside you break a sweat walking from your front door to your car :wink:

Google tells me says that’s in the USA on the south coast. It’s hot, but not as humid as some other places.

You are absolutely correct. The average humidity here in the summer is around 95%, there is a whole nother 5% before we start breathing liquid :wink:

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You don’t want to be feeding hot, soft filament through your AMS drive gears.

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I noticed that my Green Bambu sample roll of Basic PLA needs drying already. I only have had the reel in my AMS for about 3 weeks. I realize some other types of filament need constant drying. But PLA. I have never had this issue with other brands of PLA. I have 3 different filament dryers and a Food dehydrator. What I love is loading 2 or 3 roles of filament in my AMS and it switches filament when one runs out. Very nice. It would be nice if bambu had a heater to further dry my filament. More convent. If nothing else. I need more testing but so far I am not liking Bambu Lab Filament. I do dry my filament but I have not had this kind of issue with my other filament. I bought 10 roles of different colors of the Bambu PETG-HS filament. So maybe that is better. Being a newer batch. OH, I find Petg prints great, perfect in my new X1C. I use mostly Thin Tree supports and SPORT mode.The bambu filament prints find if dry. Example: I printed another spool for my filament and the Green Bambu PLA printed with a lot of zits on the top surface. Then I printed the second half in Black Generic PLA I got off TEMU.com. ;same amount of time in my AMS as the Bambu green filament and it printed PERFECT.

I ended up doing a bunch of research because the idea that water is incapable of escaping filament regardless of the humidity felt off to me since its not like we’re drying at the temps where the water would literally boil off. Turns out it is one of those “true, but …” sort of things, as desiccant drying is likely how the plastic was dried before it got turned into filament. Here’s what I learned

  1. Water will always exit plastic more efficiently at higher temperatures
  2. Desiccants become less efficient as you heat them
  3. Silica gel is less effective at low humidity, and thus can’t be relied on to continue to remove moisture under about 10-15% humidity
  4. You can not effectively or efficiently use desiccants for water removal without air movement.
  5. Desiccants produce heat as they absorb water.
  6. The actual volume of water found in plastic – even plastic we’d call extremely wet filament – is tiny, both in terms of the total volume of the plastic and the total amount of water it could potential hold.

At room temperature, drying requires humidity levels near 0%. Drying with only a desiccant requires using a desiccant other than silica gel, having enough of it to drop the humidity to extremely low, keeping the desiccant cool, and moving high volumes of air.

It goes something like this:

  1. Have two connected chambers, one containing enough of a desiccant that works well in extremely low humidity to lower the humidity to near 0 and the other containing
  2. Dry air by blowing it through the desiccant, causing it to heat up. Fan must be sufficiently forceful to make contact with all of the desiccant rather than to find paths around it.
  3. Blow that warmed air over the plastic
  4. Have a large enough return for the air that by the time it gets to the desiccant it has cooled somewhat
  5. Repeat until the filament dries

As you can imagine, this is difficult to do at home in the small footprint most people are looking for in a filament dryer.

However for everyone who is having issues with keeping filament dry, look into zeolite!

Why not add a heating element to the AMS? If drying out filament is the end-goal.