Melting Performance Improvements

We have shown a significant temperature drop in the melt zone with the sims. To counter this, I designed a 360 in the middle to achieve a more consistent viscosity across the cross section at the nozzle. Despite our current sub-optimal HF geometry, the print quality doesn’t seem to be affected noticeably compared to the SF design, which definitely has worse melting performance.

To summarize the hotend changes:

• Thermistor relocated
• No heatbreak thread
• Maraging steel instead of 316L (higher thermal conductivity)
• Better HF geometry
• Slightly longer nozzle thread
• Separate hotend shield and brace

Our goal here should be to improve the extrusion quality at all flow rates and not necessarily to chase higher and higher sustained flow rates. If these changes aren’t enough to fix the print quality issues we have with the SLM steel heatblocks, then it’s best to design something self-sourceable for milling as well.