Advice on my watercooling setup

[jaguarking11]

One thing to say, a delta printer lends itself to keep most of the electronics and motors out of the heated chamber. If your not using a bowden setup your most likely moving too much weight around to reach any reasonable speed, even if you have large motors, the larger mass your swinging around will either wear components to slack or induce flexing on the arms. The whole point of delta is to have a light mass and move it quick.

Keep the nema17's out of the chamber and attach heat sink to them. Keep the extruder out and do the same, insulate the rest of the parts and construct the heated chamber. I am working on something similar myself.

One more thing I wanted to say, I assume your going to be printing in ABS/Nylon, I currently print with no cooling on my printer in ABS. It simply does not need it, when going heated chamber I will be evaluating the need to cool the hot end, however I would steer away from water cooling. If you fatigue a tube to the point where it reaches breakage you will seriously cause issues. Most silicone tubing that would be used to water cool will be porous and will become a maintenance item, also these cheapo pumps are not designed to longevity most 3d printers have 100's of hours of work time, do you trust a ~15usd pump to last more than 100 hours? I used a pump that had a floating impeller with a jewel on the end when I was watercooling pc's. Those get expensive quick. Water cooling anything properly requires good quality components, and those are not cheap nor light.

If you insist on water cooling get a mcp355 pump and a single 120mm rad and matching fan. It will be plenty to cool the hot end as well as anything and everything you put on your printer. A single 120mm rad can dissipate 1600W of heat easily before it becomes heat soaked, not 600w, in pc's the fight is to get the parts closer to room temp, in your case the parts do not need to get there and the hotter the rads run the more efficient they get.

[MK-X]

I am using a bowden setup, but the extruder is "floating" above it with a counterweight to keep all the weight off of the effector, but with a very small bowden tube to negate as much of the disadvantage as possible. The effector is still very light. The water jacket on the E3D is only 14g. It's made for RC boats so they are designed to be incredibly light and used for many hours.

I'm using an E3DV6, running without cooling across the heatsink is not recommended by the E3D guys. That water pump is the water pump that is a paired to watercool the Kraken Hotend. I was going to use something similar to the mcp355 or a D5 pump if watercooling.


I'll just go ahead and use fans, if they end up being inefficient I'll switch over to watercooling.

I should mention that the 3 motors to move the belts are not subjected to that kind of intense heat of the chamber, but I wanted to account for overtemp protection due to high acceleration settings and max current.

I thought 600 Watts is plenty accurate for a pc watercooling system, if you average 1 component per 120mm. With decent cooling and fans per inch. I'm trying to run them with low temps, I don't want my NEMA17s over 50C, but a single rad will be more than adequate.

[jaguarking11]

When water cooling a pc users generally want the cpu/gpu/northbridge as close as possible to room temperature. Watercooling loops get more efficient with higher temperature differentials.

Let me put it this way, when watercooling a cpu we want to dissipate 100-200w of waste heat as fast as possible to bring said chip close to room temperature. The reason for this is that the chip itself once overclocked has a much lower tolerance for heat. My last watercooled pc was in the prescott days. The chip was rated at ~90w with a thermal shut off of around 75c. The chip got unstable when running at 160% of its rated speed much sooner than the thermal shut down. Therefore for me to keep the chip happy I had to be in the 30-40c range. For me to do this I had to have a very large surface area to dissipate the heat from said chip and other chips that were operating out of the design spec GPU and northbridge in my case. I used a 3x120mm radiator for it, the radiator had a temperature difference of roughly 1c idling and around 2c load from in to out verified with thermal probes. This allowed me to run my prescott under full load for weeks on end at roughly 35c with a room temp of around 27c....

What you are talking about is a much larger differential temp to meet, which a single 120mm radiator is more than happy to provide. If your hot end is in a 90c chamber you add the thermal emissions from the heater cartridge to the mix, you realistically are not dissipating more than 30w of heat on it, however even if you were your not trying to cool the hot end to room temp ~25c, your trying to cool it to workable temp ~ 40-50c, a radiator is designed to increase surface area, however that surface area becomes way more efficient if the thermal differential is in the 40c range than it does in the 5-10c range. Your steppers are designed to acomodate up to 80c, therefore you realistically only need to bring down the temperature by 20-30c for them to be happy.

I remember in the old days, we used heater cores for our water cooling systems, a typical heater core can put out more than 8000BTU of heat ~2500w of disipation. However for it to reach 2500w its designed to operate with 90c water.... You get my point? The hotter the source is, the larger the delta T the more efficient it becomes, bringing down to nearly room temps is the issue.

In either case, I would do a flex hose with a squirrel cage fan for both of them. Its simpler and less problematic, the last thing you want is water to hit a 100c bed. The only hoses designed for high flex are made of silicone, unfortunately they are porous and will loose water and add vapor to the chamber, not only that, they do tend to burst if you have a powerful enough pump and enough fatigue.

Here is a graph that shows this, notice the delta T and the watts dissipated. This is a 480mm rad, but the principle applies. Modern radiators for water cooling pc's are designed for low back pressure so you don't have to use a vacuum cleaner to keep it cool.
HWlabs480GTXThermalGraph.jpg

[MK-X]

That makes sense. You don't happen to have an squirrel cage fan recommendations do you? haha

[jaguarking11]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=squirrel+cage+fan

Funny you mention it, sunon and delta fans are good quality. Look for one with liquid filled bearings and not bushings.

[MK-X]

Oh psch, you could have easily skipped the lmgtfy. haha

[KDog]

I don't think you will have any problem with standard pc water cooling parts. The pump that I use on my pc has been working for several years now without any hickups. I also wouldn't think you'll have any problems with standard tygon tubing with the amount of flexing you will be doing. I use this in my work and have never had any failures. It is plenty flexible and will be fine. One thing though - you are always taking a chance with water cooling and its close proximity to electronics. Keep this in mind when you are working on the design.

[Mjolinor]

Speaking from experience. I have only printed PLA once and it was with the Stratasys. I bought 25 metres just to see if it would print OK. I don't use PLA as I prefer ABS but had to try it.

The bed is heated by the chamber. It is not possible to have a cold bed and a heated chamber unless you have refrigeration plant on the bed.

Suggest you buy a Stratasys and try it.

A significant number of people use PLA in place of the Stratasys support material as it is cheap and will dissolve in D-limonene.

[elmoret]

IF heated chamber = cold THEN bed = cold AND part = warped
IF heated chamber = warm THEN bed = warm AND hotend = jammed

That was my point. Never said anything about making the heated chamber warm and the bed cold. What temperature did you set the build environment to?

You say "a significant number", but I cannot find any examples on Google. Do you have any examples?

"Suggest you drop $20k and try it" is hardly helpful.

[Mjolinor]

IF heated chamber = cold THEN bed = cold AND part = warped
IF heated chamber = warm THEN bed = warm AND hotend = jammed

That was my point. Never said anything about making the heated chamber warm and the bed cold. What temperature did you set the build environment to?

You say "a significant number", but I cannot find any examples on Google. Do you have any examples?

"Suggest you drop $20k and try it" is hardly helpful.

Well if you don't have one and you won't buy one then why don't you stop giving advice about something that you know nothing about.

Your caps lock key seems to be intermittently stuck on, suggest you buy a new keyboard.