How To Use PETG in Mass Production 3D Printing

 PETG is one of the other more common materials that we use in mass production of 3d printed parts. Today we're going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using it in large-scale production. PETG is a very common type of plastic and it's actually the material that is used to make disposable water bottles and many sorts of plastic containers, it is a food safe plastic although there's a proviso to that.
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 It is very reasonably heat resistant, it is quite durable with a little bit of flexibility mixed in there. It is good for again kind of consumer level  products but it can go up into like low-grade engineering products like brackets, enclosures and certain types of chunky hard hardware that doesn't really have to be optimized very much so it's good for caps and other sorts of things that you might find inside of warehouse or industrial automation. Very often those are where we use PETG for enclosures and boxes. PETG has a very wide selection of colors available, everything from variations of tan to all sorts of different standard primary colors; we are also able to do custom pantone matching. Generally when printed PETG has a very high gloss surface though that can vary depending on what the ultimate color is that you get depending on the color that you're requesting there are sometimes the parts can vary between high gloss and semi matte. That is something to be aware of if you're looking for really high level consistency. The color and the type of PETG that you need needs to be discussed with your engineer so that you understand what's available.
 PETG as far as cost is reasonably cost effective from a material standpoint but the thing that can increase the cost of it substantially is lack of automation in certain context, if the part is not designed well enough PETG is not always automatable inside of our facilities because machines are not able to always eject it. The other thing that can contribute to cost is post-processing PETG is sort of a messy material to print; it can leave a lot of residue, strings, bumps and blobs around a part again depending on the design of the part. It can sometimes require additional cleanup from other sorts of materials like PLA which can increase the cost of the part but again much of this can be addressed with proper design of the component. We highly encourage anybody submitting a part to give permission to the account engineer to suggest any sort of design changes that might be necessary to optimize the part and be open to those suggestions because they can radically reduce the cost of operations.
PETG as we've said before is fairly durable you can drop a part from six feet or so and it generally won't shatter or break but at the same time depending on what the design is PETG can become quite brittle if printed inappropriately so make sure that your design allows it to be printed appropriately. Generally the way to get around that is to reduce overhangs which are something that sticks straight out in the air with nothing underneath it, try to reduce those as much as possible especially with PETG. In order to print those reliably it requires turning on a cooling fan but turning on a cooling fan cools the layers in such a way that the next layer coming down does not adhere as well to the layer before it so it can hurt the strength of the part if the fan has to be used a lot to maintain the detail of the part. PETG is not the cheapest material that we have. It has a reasonably high startup cost of about 50 to 100 for like a sample or a single prototype minimum. This is mainly because it requires optimization for the design of the part itself and it can't just be dropped in most of the time but as it gets into scale the parts can decrease and cost a lot because the raw material cost of PETG if appropriately sourced is actually lower than materials like PLA in some cases. That changes and varies all the time they are part of a commodities market and those can fluctuate back and forth, depending on when you get a quote. PETG  might be cheaper or PLA might suddenly become cheaper,  generally PETG is a very good option to create functional parts and consumer products. With food safety in relation to the consumer products PETG is food safe because it's BPA free and it does not have any sort of chemicals within it that can be considered food unsafe. The problem with food safe parts is that it is not really dependent on the material. If you are 3D printing a mug out of PETG it is done with an FDM printer which means you have layer alliance, even though the material is food safe the process and the results from the process really aren't. This is because it's very difficult to sanitize a 3D printed part that has a lot of ridges inside of it. Even though PETG is food safe it really isn't and if you submit a certain product to us we will evaluate it based on its application to see if it should be produced with 3d printing or if you should move into something like molding to get just the right kind of surface and have the right material to create a food safe product.
 Hopefully that covers most of the issues and advantages of PETG, it's a very durable product it can be used in a lot of applications but it can be a little bit messy and tough to set up. You need to plan ahead and ensure that there's time to optimize the part, the design and the process to produce that reliably and as affordably as possible. With that being said when you reach scale it can be very cost effective and it can be used in high heat environments or reasonably durable or industrial environments without any sort of issue at all. Let us know down below if there's something else about producing final products with PETG that you'd like to know about and we'll try to get those covered in another video. 
Have a great day everybody.

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