Questions about 3D-printer which is made of interlacing conductive filament

This is a question about 3D printers. I don't know whether it is proper to ask you questions here...I hope someone can help me out. There are conductive filament for 3D printers which seem to have between 30 and 115 ohm/centimeter resistance depending on the axis. (Proto-Pasta conductive PLA)

They can be 3D printed as a capacitor of 2 cubicly-interlacing-but-not-touching matrices as follows, with one negative and one positive:
Attachment 11220
Does it have useful properties? I figure probably it could already be done, but here maybe it can be done at home simply and relatively cheaply, and so I wonder what that does, if someone can figure it out. I don't have yet the equipment to try. With a cheap printer I can't imagine doing more than 2x20x20x20 cubes, inside 20 * 20 * 20cm, with 1cm per side. I know that's surely not much compared to normal caps rolled onto themselves. I tried it with normal filament. The bridging is tricky, but it can be done, so I wonder about the theory.

Attachment 11219

Sorry for the blurred image..An interesting thing about 3D printers is that it can create shapes of things nested one into the other. But I don't understand capacitors(http://www.kynix.com/Product/36.html) and so it's possible the effect cancels out and that it's of no use as it is, or that the standard plate-against-plate is better.


Anyway, I'll be trying it eventually, or at the least, a standard configuration.

Having tried a lot of different conductive filament (they're currently actually all the same) I'd have to say that I doubt they'd be conductive enough to make an efficient capacitor from.

Perhaps not filaments, but there are highly conductive print media out there.


Here's a toroid inductor one of our users printed:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nKqwcXcEgY

There is some new conductive filament in development that doesn't use carbon.
They wouldn;t tell me what it does use, but hopefully It'll hit the market next year sometime.

Wouldn't building layer by layer capacitors be more efficient than that matrix?
In any case I doubt the capacitors would perform too well. I think the best bet for conductive printing at the moment is a second toolhead controlled by a servo which can be raised or lowered and uses one of those conductive ink markers to lay traces. Dunno how well it would work for capacitors but people have certainly made circuits with these sorts of pens.