I compare Prusa Mini heatbreak upgrade option via Simscale. Brozzl Titanium, Bondtech Stainless and Slice Engineering Copperhead all get a chance to shine. Simulation: www.simscale.com/projects/dsz...
As another engineer watching this video, I have to commend your excellent work. This is worthy of a masters thesis. Your assumptions are solid and your insights are very astute. I especially love that your measured temps by sticking a thermometer down the throat were spot on (simple yet brilliant). I purchased one of the Trianglelab Titanium designs and plan on replacing it next time I get a chance.
Awesome video. Prusa sends AG Silver with all the replacements you buy from them (they will send you this if you buy a heatbreak, heatsink or heatblock). The thermal conductivity of this one is 3.8 W/mK and can handle up to 250°C constant temperatures (more than enough for the heatsink section). I've seen higher Thermal Conductivity in CPU thermal pastes, but these cannot work for such temperatures for a long time. I tried using regular Thermaltake in an extruder and it dried up super fast, caused a clog and I had to replace it. So it may be worth re-running the tests
As an engineer watching your vid was like: maybe there's still hope in human sense and science. I very much appreciate the effort you have put making this. I'm among the Mini users who don't have problems (luck) printing with any filaments however I ordered the Bondtexh extruder and heatbreak in any case but as per your experience I won't switch it. Don't fix it if it isn't broke. Thanks for your very thorough work and keep on!
If you use some really good thermal paste (boron nitride) on the Stock Heatbreak, will it be enough to solve the PTFE shrinkage issues? And would it change the values enough to require a PID tune? I am keeping mine as close to stock as possible as I want to be able to stay current with the firmware updates they are working on.
I tried Bondtech heatbreak and compared with Mini original one it has shorter heating zone that causes never ending problems with Prusament PLA. Could you please also add E3D Revo heatbreak in the simulation?
PLEASE DON'T void your warranty like I did because there is not much to gain. I realized the Marlin implementation of PID autotune isn't really good. I'll try to cover that later. Also at 5:20 I made a mistake and the selected a too big area for air heat convection on the Copperhead (you can see the it highlighted by blue). I think it doesn't change much because the heat transfer coefficient is so small compared to the thermal paste, it barely makes any difference.
