Went to the Rocky Mountain RepRap festival yesterday. At the Big Tree Tech booth they had a spool of TPU filament running through an AMS with no problems.
They actually call this nTPU. It’s different from your normal TPU. It prints like PLA because, on the spool, it’s hard like PLA. They had it printing on a P1S using an AMS system. They were printing the typical benchy. One of the interesting things when looking at the printing process was the lack of stringing. The benchy also came out as a pretty good quality print.
When you take it off the build play, it feels almost like a typical PLA print. It’s both hard and rigid. The softening process occurs after the print is finished. They said there are two ways to get the filament to become soft like typical TPU. They also said it’s equivalent to between an 80 and a 90 rating.
The two methods they mentioned are:
Allowed to absorb humidity from the air. Depending on where you live will determine how long it takes to soften the object.
You can place a printed object in a container of water and allowed to remain in the water for about 10 minutes, or a little longer. Talking with the reps at the show, it seemed like this would be the option that I would need because of the low humidity here in Colorado.
I was pretty jazzed by this new development, but was bummed to find out it’s not available yet.
It’s going to be sold under the BiQu name, rather than the Big Tree Tech name.
Interesting. Does it reharden when in dry environments or does it remain permanently soft?
If it rehardens then that mean a spool exposed to moisture can be dried and printed but that also means items printed in it won’t remain soft which limits their usefulness.
Thermoplastische Polyurethane have interesting properties that are not just based on their rigidity - That’s why I keep my eyes open for TPUs that get even harder than 58D which you actual can get.
There are already methods for getting to 58A with real TPU with under-extrusion …:
The problem still is at Bambulab only which simply reject all types of TPU without apology as soon as you want to load it into the AMS - So the solutions have been there for a long time:
And because of the poor description of this new “Big Tree Tech” fillament, the fillament is useless at all… UV resistance? Resistance to solvents? Splitter properties? Standards met for possible residues? And so on… They can sell this on Amazon as far as I’m concerned. At least for me, just good enough for the trash can due to missing specification and 3 batch checks…
My understanding is it’s supposed to stay flexible because the melting causes a change in the properties. How does this affect storage? Don’t know. Since it’s still in development like a couple other things I saw for Bambu, the reps didn’t seem to have the kind of in depth info you’d have with a finished product.
We’ll know more once a final product is released so all of the information is available. I’m interested in the potential, which is why I’m not going to dismiss it right out of the gate.
I posted this to make people aware of what’s being worked on. When the final product is released we can hit BTT with all of these questions and others. I will more than likely get a spool to do some testing on. My guess is a bunch of youtube viewers will do the same thing.
