Layer adhesion is one of the weak points with FDM 3D printing, with annealing often recommended as a post-processing step. An interestingly creative method for this was published in Science Advance…

Paper mentioned in article can be found here.

Annealing prints has been something I’ve wanting to do more of, probably with proper temperature control as my experience has has more waste than I’d like, mainly warping.

Paper claims some pretty dramatic improvements to interlayer strength, they’re running filament through a bath before entering the extruder, not sure how accessible the entire thing would be in a hobbyist environment (using chloroform and specialised microwave equipment). Makes me wonder however if carbon fibre filaments would be able to be processed similarly, how well it’d perform with stuff like abs or nylon and if you could achieve that with consumer microwaves.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•3 days ago

      Probably, it’s not pleasant stuff afaik, was looking at it earlier and it seemed like you could probably source it domestically fairly easily too, didn’t seem like you’d need special licenses or anything. Not stuff I want to keep around though, not that a lot of solvents that work on thermoplastics are nice to be around for one reason or another.