I was wondering whether there is somewhere a dataset collecting the mechanical properties of different filaments.
Some filament vendors provide some mechanical properties data about their filament, others don’t. On the few comparison I was able to make, I noticed big differences among the same filament type, such as PLA+.
For example, regarding the Flexural Modulus, one brand of PLA+ could report 4175Mpa, while another one reports 1973Mpa. Clearly, the second offers a much higher Elongation at Break. This means that depending on the application, it could make sense to select one brand of filament with respect to another (of the same type).
I would expect this type of mechanical properties to be easy to fetch, but a lot of vendors provide only how accurate the diameter of their filaments is.
(edit: typo)
So prusa totally does maintain a material props page it’s not exhaustive nor does it have full details for every filament they list but it does have a lot of info. Includes into about hotend and bed temps, enclosure and surface recommendations, deflection temperature, impact resistance and tensile strengths.
Might be a good place to start, love the idea of an open, community maintained mech props db
Yes, it’s definitely a good point of information. It looks like it was also referenced in the Prusa blog: Advanced Filament Guide.
That post is a bit old (2020), and I fear it has not been updated in a while, considering that the post writer replied only in the first year and all the following comments ended up without replies. It is a pity, considering also that the post ended with a sort of request for users to propose new filaments to test. I see that the last comment is fairly recent (2024) so I guess someone is trying to get more information to be added. Alas, it’s kind of understandable: it could be expensive and time consuming to test other brands filaments for the sake of keeping the maker community happy.
In the post seems that the data collected in the table is coming from real tests made at Prusa Research, so this makes me hope that the experiment setup has been kept the same for the different tests.
I wouldn’t be surprised if prusa has a lab for qa purposes and they used that for the testing. And yeah I totally get it, I’d assume that at least prusament entries are up to date.
On a plus, definitely feel like I see mech props in product info more often, I’ve been using Canadian Filaments Carbon Capture PETG lately, they give UTS, Tensile Modulus and Impact Strength.
It’s strange that they provide that information for the Carbon Capture PETG and they skipped all the remaining filaments, included the standard PETG. Maybe, they just started testing and adding that info to their products.
I am new to the field, so I cannot judge, but I am happy to hear that you noticed an increase in the mech props reporting. Hopefully, that will be the standard.