Air Assist Experiments (Not Glowforge Specific)

[evermorian]

This is interesting:

Air-Assist Analysis Reveals Most Effective — And Quietest — Methods

Queue the air assist fan replacement hacks!

[sqw]

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. So the easy one would be just to put a more powerful fan in the same position on the carriage plate. Don’t know if there is such a thing.

But I’ve also been thinking about making the scoop narrower and more focused on the beam, maybe filling in the sides of the scoop or making the scoop sort of funnel shaped

[mrinken]

It is interesting. I’ve never looked “under the hood” at the air assist fan assembly in any depth, but I’d assume there’s probably a more efficient design for the scoop that would help.

[eflyguy]

3D printed nozzle:

Air assist fan upgrade?

I read recently that it’s not about the volume of flow in the air assist but the smoothness of air flow that makes the biggest difference in cut cleanliness.

Would be pretty trivial to design. You’d want it to be as light as possible.

Upgrading the fan would put more electrical load on the system, in addition to added weight - that would be risky in my opinion.

[jbmanning5]

@eflyguy

Would be pretty trivial to design

The only thing I would probably do is bench test any design for flow before sticking it on the machine and running a job for real world testing. I may be wrong, but I thought axial fans performed better under high volume/low pressure situations, rather than low volume/high pressure. You don’t need a ton of pressure coming out, even 2-3 psi is enough for an air assist. But you’d want to make sure that you’ve got that.

[henryhbk]

I do this in my milling machine to keep flood coolant off the lens of the GoPro. I used a commercial grade aquarium air pump (barely audible) which is on the same internal circuit as the flood coolant pump so it is under g-code control. Not super high pressure (if I wanted that I could just take the high-pressure air feed in the machine which is 100psi regulated (from my screw compressor, but that would launch my GoPro like an air rocket… as all I wanted was a nice fan shaped continuous air curtain in from of the lens to blow scattered droplets away