How to choose the perfect infill for 3d printing -

Choosing the best infill for a print

How to choose the perfect infill

How fast and strong do you want your printing to be?

This is the first question you need to ask yourself when choosing the best infill for 3d printing.

The infill is the material inside your 3D printed object and has a structural function both during the printing process, as it supports the upper walls, and in the finished object. This infill, therefore, plays a fundamental role in determining the final strength of the part, and its weight, but also its aesthetic finish.

What parameters should be set to adjust the infill?

The main parameter of the infill is the filling density.

Higher infill percentages almost always mean stronger and heavier objects, but also longer printing times and higher filament consumption.
Conversely, if the infill percentage is lower, the object will be lighter and faster to print, but at the same time more fragile.
For aesthetic prints such as vases or containers, it is possible to reduce this percentage even to 0%, resulting in an empty object composed only of the outer walls.

The second parameter to set is the infill pattern

The infill pattern is basically the design of the inner filling, and it has a great influence on the printing speed and the structural characteristics of the object.

With slicing software you can choose between different options: grid, honeycomb, lines, etc., which are developed in two dimensions on the XY axis, but there are also more advanced software such as Cura, which offer 3d patterns such as gyroid or cubic and which allow you to have very good resistance.

If you want a fast print, which consumes little filament, choose the pattern lines: a good compromise between strength and printing speed.
If your priority is maximum printing speed but you need suitable support for the upper walls of your object, Cura slicer has developed a specific pattern for you: Lightning.
With this selective infill, the material is only deposited when you need support for the top walls, while the rest of the object will be hollow.

So how do you choose the perfect infill?

The perfect infill for 3D printing depends very much on the characteristics required for the final object.

FILOALFA® recommends:

  • Generic prints: 10-30% - Lines, grid or gyroid
  • Prototypes and functional parts: 30-80% - cubic, octet, gyroid
  • Aesthetic prints: 0-20% - Lighting, Lines
  • Flexible objects: 0-50% - Lines, gyroid

High-density infill up to 80-100% can give unexpected results, so they are only recommended for specific uses.

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