Polymaker Says Its New HT-PLA Pro Is the Best Filament It’s Ever Made
The new material boasts impressive fatigue, strength and temperature resistance, says Polymaker, with all of the easy printability of PLA.
Polymaker’s announcement video for its latest filament poses a great thought: Desert Island filaments. You’re stranded on a tropical island with your favorite 3D printer and one pallet of one type of filament. Which filament do you take?
PLA is easiest to print, but can be brittle and will soften when left in the sun. PETG is more weatherproof and tougher, but trickier to keep in printable condition without a dryer. The list goes on, each with their upsides and downsides. Polymaker’s pitch is that HT-PLA Pro has no meaningful trade-offs, in what they think is the ultimate answer for almost all users, desert island or not.
Polymaker HT-PLA Pro is a new PLA-PHB blend that the company describes as “pairing heat stability technology with rugged toughness in one easy-to-print PLA package.” PLA, as we well know, is the most popular and most printed filament, and for good reason – it’s really easy to print. HT-PLA exists to improve the temperature resistance of regular PLA, giving it survivability in warmer environments and use-cases. In the new HT-PLA Pro, Polymaker adds the toughness.
Printing it should be familiar territory – Polymaker states no tuning is required and you can use your regular PLA print settings for HT-PLA Pro, no enclosure or hardened nozzle necessary. Polymaker recommends drying at 60 °C for 6 hours. All standard PLA considerations.
Samples of the new filament were stress tested in a Polymaker-devised thermosiphon impact rig. This tool contains a passive, water-based convection loop at its core, which can gradually soak heat into a 3D printed carriage (with a nested, also printed bumper). A motorized pulley draws the carriage back before slamming it into a steel plate until breaking.
Multiple carriages and bumpers, all printed from various Polymaker materials, underwent the test, which by design exposed each assembly to a variety of possible failure modes – either through heat transferred from the thermosiphon to the carriage, or from the bumper impacting the plate.
In the video, HT-PLA Pro outperformed all other Polymaker PLAs in the thermosiphon impact test, as well as other tougher material classes that you might typically choose because they’re known to be tougher than PLA. In all, the HT-PLA Pro survived more than double the impacts of the company’s specifically tough PLA Pro.
The technical data sheet adds nuance to the story, though, with the new material faring worse than PLA Pro in the notched charpy impact test, for example. So less sudden, heavy-impact resistant, but, as the lengthy video explaining the test concedes, the benefit lies more in a combination of factors that together give everyday durability of a print, rather than specific fringe hits.
One key claim of the material is that it won’t soften and sag in temperatures up to 150 °C right off the build plate – that means high temperature resistance without the need for annealing.
HT-PLA Pro is available now, in 18 colors at $25.99 per 1 kg spool from the Polymaker store. To compare, a spool of HT-PLA currently costs $24.99, while a spool of PLA Pro is $23.99 per 1 kg spool.
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