Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)
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Re: Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)
#2Probably anything intentionally melting chemicals should come with built-in fume capture.
Re: Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)
#3[2019]
The actual article should be this one:
Re: Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)
#4[2019] The actual article should be this one: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b04168
Notably the title in there says " Consumer-Level 3D Printer "
Re: Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)
#5Probably anything intentionally melting chemicals should come with built-in fume capture.
Not just melting chemicals but also forms of laser cutting materials too.
E.g. reminded of the death of this couple from carbon monoxide (possibly but not concluded to be by a laser cutter setup) - https://www.berkeleyside.org/2017/04/20/still-mystery-inspec... , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13507734
Re: Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)
#6Probably anything intentionally melting chemicals should come with built-in fume capture.
Not just melting chemicals but also forms of laser cutting materials too. E.g. reminded of the death of this couple from carbon monoxide (possibly but not concluded to be by a laser cutter setup) - https://www.berkeleyside.org/2017/04/20/still-mystery-inspec... , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13507734
LASER cutting is also melting (and evaporating) chemicals.
Re: Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)
#7I've seen these studies before and done some testing of my own and found this to be true to some degree. I've used PMSA003I and BME688 sensors to check for particulate and VOC's. I didn't notice any significant increase in PM1 or PM2.5 (which is probably to be expected since the particles emitted are probably <1um and lower than I can detect). I did see some increase in VOC's but nothing alarmingly high from baseline. Roughly equivalent to lighting a candle.
Re: Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)
#8Isn't this just common sense?
Re: Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)
#9The chemicals used for resin printers make this look benign.
Re: Commercial 3D printers emit traces of toxic fumes, study finds (2019)
#10Isn't this just common sense?
It's "common sense" if you're familiar enough with chemistry and biology to realize that melting plastic means some small fraction of it will 'burn' and end up in the air.
On the other hand, many entry-level 3D printers are marketed at... children, effectively. They can make for amazing christmas presents, but there's no guarantee that either parents nor child has any idea how things work at that level. There's been a concerted effort to make such knowledge unnecessary.
All of that being said, PLA fumes are about as safe as it gets. To the best of my understanding it's about on the level of cooking food. For hours, granted, and usually without a fume hood -- but I don't think it's likely to cause health issues.
...
And so long as you stick to PLA or PETG, that's probably fine. Oh, and so long as your printer was built with a quality, all metal heat break, so you never get teflon fumes from scorched PTFE lining. And so long as there's never a thermal runaway that causes fire, and/or it was built with good thermal runaway protection.
These printers are still essentially industrial machinery, no matter how user friendly, and a lack of understanding their failure modes can be really bad.