Printing with PHA Filament as Potential Alternative to PLA
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Printing with PHA Filament as Potential Alternative to PLA
PLA (polylactic acid) has become the lowest common denominator in FDM 3D printing, offering decent performance while being not very demanding on the printer. That said, it’s often noted that the supposed biodegradability of PLA turned out to be somewhat dishonest, as it requires an industrial composting setup to break it down. Meanwhile, a potential alternative has been waiting in the wings for a while, in the form of PHA. Recently, [JanTec Engineering] took a shot at this filament type to see how it prints and tests its basic resistance to various forms of abuse.
PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoates) are polyesters that are produced by microorganisms, often through bacterial fermentation. Among their advantages are biodegradability without requiring hydrolysis as the first step, as well as UV-stability. There are also PLA-PHA blends that exhibit higher toughness, among other improvements, such as greater thermal stability. So far, PHA seems to have found many uses in medicine, especially for surgical applications where it’s helpful to have a support that dissolves over time.
As can be seen in the video, PHA by itself isn’t a slam-dunk replacement for PLA, if only due to the price. Finding a PHA preset in slicers is, at least today, uncommon. A comment by the CTO of EcoGenesis on the video further points out that PHA has a post-printing ‘curing time’, so that mechanical tests directly after printing aren’t quite representative. Either you can let the PHA fully crystallize by letting the part sit for ~48 hours, or you can speed up the process by putting it in an oven at 70 – 80°C for 6-8 hours.
Overall, it would seem that if your goal is to have truly biodegradable parts, PHA is hard to beat. Hopefully, once manufacturing capacity increases, prices will also come down. Looking for strange and wonderful printing filament? Here you go.
youtube.com/embed/Me8UEWEKvmA?…
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@LALegault did they evoke any remembrance of things past?
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@luis_in_brief what about the fact that the Firefox business model (getting paid by Google to make Google Search their preferred search engine) has been declared by a judge to be anti-competitive behaviour?
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I am 99% sure the other faithful knew he wasn't a traitor. They were just sick of his bullshit, and didn't want to share the prize with him when he hadn't helped. Right on, I say.
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It was cool as hell. This guy had every chance in the world to not shoot himself in the foot. And he would have gotten tens of thousands of dollars for just putting a sock in it. But instead, he fell in love with the sound of his own voice, and being a nuisance, and he unpopularized himself out of winning the game.
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@evan thanks!
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Meglio non usare tutte cifre diverse per il pin
@matematica - Almeno se avete paura che qualcuno sappia quali cifre avete digitato
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So, they found and banished the last traitor, despite his bullshit. And when there were only four faithful left, and they could stop and split the prize money, the other three were like, hmm, maybe there's another traitor here. We don't want to stop. And then they did another round of voting, and voted off the shit-disturber. And then they split the money three ways instead.
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One guy, Étienne, before they took out the last traitor, had been starting shit. They all knew who the last traitor was (Ismaëlle), but he decided he had a private theory that *could* be true, even though he knew it wasn't. And he kept repeating it and repeating it, even though everyone asked him to get with the fucking program. But he was like, I'm just asking questions, and, we need to consider all the possibilities.
