Suction Head for attaching a Zimpure Air Purifier to the SE300 hot end

thingiverse

I had noticed that some filament, particularly PETG material, would make my eyes burn and irritate my sinuses during lengthy prints. My workshop does not have the best ventilation, so I was faced with (1) moving my printer to the garage or basement, (2) installing ventilation out through the wall of my workshop, or (3) finding a self-contained filtration system. I saw the Zimpure product and it seemed the simplest solution, so I decided to give it a try. There was no suction head available for the SE300 on my Artemis, so I had to design one. The photos show it mounted on an Artemis printer. It is printed in red Push Plastic PLA. With the silicone sock on the heater block, the PLA stays plenty cool. Without the sock, you might need to print it in ABS or PETG. The two parts are keyed for assembly and can be super-glued together. I recommend 100% infill rectilinear, .2mm layers, .6mm extrusion width. I had good luck printing these without support, but if you don't get good bridging on the end that goes nearest the heater block, you might use some support there. The suction head attaches using the screw that fastens the SE300 circuit board to the top of one of the layer fans. For the Artemis printer, I found the the optimal length of the black silicone suction tube to be about 29 inches. This is shortened from the stock tubing that is supplied with the Zimpure. The Zimpure base unit is elevated about 4 inches above the surface that my Artemis is on. I am anticipating the added mass of the suction head and the suction tubing might cause some artifacts like ringing at higher print speeds, but I don't see much of that at 40mm/s speed. I did a 30-minute test print with ABS, and the filter did seem to keep the smell to a minimum although it did not eliminate it completely. Stay tuned for updates.... 12/16/2018: Despite the tight fit, after about 12 hours of printing the tube popped out of the suction head. You might want to check it before long prints to make sure it is pushed all the way in. 12/18/2018: I was wondering if the suction head and tube added enough mass to increase ringing, so I printed a test cube designed to induce ringing with lots of sharp corners. You can see on the last photo that the additional mass of the Zimpure components only contributed very slightly to ringing artifacts. The default settings on the Artemis Duet firmware are MaxAccel = 5000, MaxJerk = 2000. When I reduced these to 500 and 10, the ringing on the test cube was almost nonexistent, and there was no noticeable difference when the Zimpure suction head and tube were connected vs absent.