HTPLA3 – Natural Opaque

Not your everyday PLA, HTPLA v3 offers the ease of PLA printing with such exceptional quality, compatibility, reliability, durability, performance, and finish that you’ll want to use it every day!  Protopasta’s Premium HTPLA v3 is our own exclusive, unique formulation based on extensive in-house testing and our industry-leading experience working with heat treatable PLA.  HTPLA v3 prints like standard PLA, but can be heat treated for much higher temperature stability than standard PLA.  HTPLA v3 offers exceptional performance and finish for your functional prototypes and final part production.

Features

• Easy to print
• Optimal layer adhesion
• Exceptional quality and consistent flow
• Exceptional stiffness and strength, if annealed
• Engineering-grade performance, if annealed
• Plus than 3x improvement in thermal stability, if annealed
• Less moisture uptake compared to HTPLA v2
• Minimal shrinkage during heat treating compared to HTPLA v2
• Higher temperature printing, up to 250° C
• No heated bed required
• Usable on most PLA-compatible printers

Tech specifications

Tips&Tricks

HTPLA like PLA can print at 200 °C or less, though exceptional mechanical results were achieved printing up to 250 °C or more for nearly twice the layer strength compared to 230 °C as tested in ProtoPasta lab. Heated bed is not required, but larger, more solid parts can benefit from bed temperature up to 70 °C. Standard build surface preparation like tape or glue stick work best along with slow (10-20 mm/s) and hot (220C+) first layer with enough gap not to restrict material extrusion.

How to do “Heat Treatment”
Bake your parts into a oven until you see a change from translucent to opaque. There is an obvious visual change indicating the improved performance!
In as little as 5-10 minutes for small, thin parts and as much a few hours for massive parts, HTPLA v3 parts crystallize in an oven at 110C +/- 10 °C to become more stiff. We recommend leaving the supports on your parts, placing them on a non-radiating surface (like glass, ceramic, or composite), and letting them cool in the oven to minimize distortion. Parts can be baked at a lower temperature (though must be above 60 °C for any change to occur) for a longer time with less risk of unwanted deformation.

TIP!
When you anneal a material like PLA materials it means that the plastic will continue to harden when exposed to low but consistent heat. Annealing will cause any 3d printed objects to temper, making it significantly less brittle and extremely tough. If done correctly, annealed parts will be resistant to warping, and maintain its original shape and structure.
Best results are with flat and/or supported parts with 100% infill. In this instance we experienced x/y shrinkage of only 0.5% and negligible z change.

Due to all the different types of hot-end it’s extremely difficult to give a temperature advice. Please consider these tips, provided by the manufacturer, as a starting point to find the temperatures that work well in your setup. You may have to adjust the temperature settings slightly based on your type of printer.

For more about how to print HTPLA, consider the Protopasta getting started guide.