Slicing and printing airfoils with PLA Aero

I’m having trouble with a slicing (Bambu P1S with PLA-Aero) so I’d be grateful if someone could have a look and advise what I’m doing wrong. This is a Drive link to the Fusion file because I can’t link an attachment:

The slicing and printing of the large airfoil is fine, one continuous pass for the ribs and the inner wall and one pass for the outer wall. However, the slicer doesn’t “properly see” the gaps between the ribs and the inner wall of the small airfoil and slices it in 4 “runs”, centre, aft, fwd and outer wall; I tried printing the small airfoil but the print collapsed after ~10 minutes due to excessive stringing.

I created the two airfoils in the exact same manner (airfoil > offset 0.6mm > perpendicular lines to cut the ribs > extrusion to length) so it’s strange that one works and the other doesn’t. I have already tried the following for the small airfoil but nothing works:

  • Various gaps between the ribs and the wall
  • Various gap shapes between the ribs and the wall
  • All 0.2mm and 0.16mm profiles

Per the above, it seems to me it’s a drawing problem but I can’t really understand why the slicer is fine with the large airfoil but “doesn’t like” the small airfoil.

I really need to solve this because I eventually want to print these in vase mode which is even worse currently since the slicer sees only the outline of the airfoils and not the ribs.

I’m very new to printing so apologies in advance if it’s something obvious and I don’t see it, thanks!

Studio sees the gaps, but it is filling them. Try reducing Quality>Precision>Slice gap closing radius to 0.001 mm.

The ribs still disappear when sliced in vase mode, but I’ve never attempted that before. I did it once in OrcaSlicer, but I could not repeat it in Studio, nor when I tried again in Orca. Not sure what I did differently, but the ribs appear only on the first layer.

Here is the non-vase project file exported from Studio if someone else wants to find the magic vase settings: flaps_test.3mf (99.7 KB)

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It sliced exactly like it did the large airfoil!

I guess even the slightest difference affects how the slicer works so this is very useful. I got something printing right now so I’ll put this through first thing in the morning, thanks a lot @lkraus!!

Next day update: Print had a lot more stringing because the trailing edge of the small airfoil is sharper but cleans up quite well so no problem. Now comes the hard part of doing this in vase mode… tips/comments more than welcome!!

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