Printing at 0.025mm layer height

Today I wanted to see whats possible on my TAZ 5. So I did a search on Thingiverse for a small and nice object and set my layer height as small as never before.

Settings:
Layer height: 0.025mm :sunglasses:
10 solid layers on bottom, 15 on top
Infill every 5 layers

As expected, it’s no perfect print. Oozing is near to not stopable at this low layer height (lower part of the owls) and the harmonic frequences gave the surface a rough finish (but that makes a nice effect :wink: ).
But I was a little bit surprised that it was working at all! Here it is after 3h of printing:


It seems there is a reasonable lower limit at 0.05mm as long as you don’t need to cross the perimeters too often (because of oozing).

Not that I’m any expert here, just it seems to me that the ratio of nozzle diameter to layer height is (for the most part) the key to this. If the printer can print at 0.025mm layer height mechanically, then I’d suggest that the solution to those quality defects is to use a smaller nozzle, say a 0.25mm nozzle. In this way the ratio of 10:1 is in place. Now, as to filament and temp of filament - well that’s a whole other story!

Les

There is an upper limit for the layer height of about 0.8*nozzle diameter, but there shouldn’t be a lower one. The artefacts I had in this prints are due to vibrations in the X and Y axis. It’s an easy calculation: The amplitude of the vibration at a given speed is always the same, lets say 0.01mm just to have a number. If you print at 0.2mm layer height, thats 5% change in layer height during printing. At 0.025mm, your layer height change due to vibration is 40% - it’s not a surprise that the ripple is visible increased now…

There probably isn’t a mechanical limit… its really the limit of my patience… :slight_smile: It takes forever to print at .1… can’t imagine at .025. My prints luckily don’t require that type of detail, and my patience definitely can’t take the wait.