[alkonaut]

It must be very application specific what kind of air cooling you get? If you have a motor enclosed on an e-bike vs. if you have it naked on some kind of aircraft with a propeller blowing on it must make a huge difference?

A problem I guess with plastic is that it doesn't conduct the heat to the outside like a metal construction would, so it will always dissipate less than metal, regardless of environment? That issue is still there if you add liquid cooling - the plastic won't transfer heat to the cooling medium either.

What's the state of the art in high-temperature resistant 3D-printed materials?

[onmobiletemp]

They print titanium and ceramics ive heard. Must be expensive. I would be very interested in seeung someone print a ceramic motor, beefed up to account for poor strength of ceramics. Yes most hub motors are closed but its very common for people to drill holes in the walls of the motor to get some air cooling. Less common is actually filling the closed hub motor with oil -- ive seen blog posts where people report that if you get that to work it does wonders for cooling. But there are huge problems with it, mainly related to accounting for the expansion of the oil as it heats up. Even less common is real liquid cooling where coolant is channelled down the axle and into the stator. Doing it with plastuc would mean having some metal inserts for heat conduction to the coils.

[crwalker]

Ultem from Stratasys (a grade of PEI) is used frequently in aerospace applications where high temperature / low flammability are required. http://www.stratasys.com/materials/fdm/~/media/83DA2BBEE7DE4...

There's always metal too.

[Already__Taken]

That carbon printer would move the heat around very well.

[dogma1138]

Not really, like most micro particle or fiber filaments the thermoplastic resin is the weak part.

Any thermoplastic extruded filament that does not require secondary treatment is going to be heat sensitive.

The filaments that are not heat sensitive are either ones that require substantial heat to extrude in the first place or at then chemically treated to not be thermoplastics anymore.

If you think about this way it's simple, the melting point and the thermoplastic point of the end product needs to be substantially higher than it's operating temperature this cannot be done without additional treatment or using a process other than thermal extrusion.

Resins that use chemicals or light to harden are can have thermal resistance properties, metals and other materials that are extruded or bonded at very high temperatures are also resistant to relatively high operating temperatures.

[Already__Taken]

Makes sense, Although I was trying to infer that the carbon material would transfer the head through the object better. Which would make using a liquid cooling channel useful. As opposed to just outright higher thermal operation.

But this is only evidenced from the carbon on my XPS laptop becoming untouchable in full-sun and much of the base heating evenly from the processor.