Hi all,
I am wondering about filament deformation under load and the impact of temperature.
So there are simple clips that you can print for cable management that are U-shaped. I printed them out of curiosity in PLA, and as you can expect, since they are snap-on, with time, they deformed/bent and became too loose to stick together.
There is another thing that might have an impact on that, and it’s that those clips are behind the PC, which, when the GPU is under high load, heats up, and the ambient temperature can be up to 35, maybe even 40°C.
The question here is how much better PETG HF would be in that scenario. Temperature-wise, for sure it has better resistance, but how about deforming while holding a load?
If not PETG, ABS would be better? For such a simple item, it does not make sense, I think, to go any heavier than this; any engineering materials or something expensive like that would be an overshoot.
The keyword you are looking for is “creeping” or creeping under load. All FDM materials do this, some more, some less. PLA is known for its exceptional high creeping, completely loosing tension after short time, only rivalled by Polyamid. For me, often creeping is the bigger issue in technical applications than temperature resistance.
PETG behaves much much better and is my typical choice when something is continuously under tension. It also creeps slightly after some time but mostly maintains tension. I think Polycarbonate is even a bit better, but PETG usually is good enough where PLA fails completely.
Edit: higher temperatures increase tendency to creep as you suspected, but I guess, for your application, PETG should be still fine.
Thank you i was missing that name, creeping is exactly what i was looking for. I will try PETG in that case, im not a huge fan of ABS so even better for me
PLA would deform lessinitially, then it would slowly creep and eventually creep more than PETG.
Basically PLA is a very high rigidity material, but it’s not ideal for continuous load bearing. In some ways, it’s just a liquid that is very very thick
You do still suffer from creeping for other materials, but almost all of them are better than PLA except for obviously TPU
i was missing that name, creeping is exactly what i was looking for. I will try PETG in that case, im not a huge fan of ABS so even better for me