hi everyone, i don’t know how many of you print tpu, but i find that’s one of the weakness of sovol sv06 ace printer.
Not having a specific process for orca slicer made me suspicious and i wanted to try a print… that’s really bad, so now i’m start tuning by myself… has someone of you already done it? I would love to hear about some of your settings…
Thanks to everyone who would like to share
The SV06 (Plus) ACE prints TPU very well. There’s a big difference between Generic TPU and Sovol SV06 ACE TPU in the Orca slicer! The Generic profile is much too fast. There are no problems with the SV06 (Plus) ACE profile.
I’ve had good luck with TPU on the ACE, but I found Sovol’s default Orca profile didn’t work very well for me. This will of course depend on the exact filament you’re using (I’ve only printed relatively hard 95A and 92A TPU so far), but here is the filament profile I ended up with:
- Flow ratio: Around 0.99-1.01 range. Calibrate by filament brand & hardness, but I needed slightly higher than for PLA overall.
- Pressure advance: 0.6. Important! Needs to be way higher for flexible filaments than for PLA. Too low pressure advance leads to stringing, blobbing, etc. Normal calibration prints don’t help much here, so I printed Cali Cats at 0.3-0.8 until I found a setting that resolved stringing and blobbing between the tail and body.
- Nozzle temperature: 225c first layer, 220c other layers. Sovol’s defaults are way too hot and lead to terrible bridging. 220c seemed to be a good balance (too high and bridges collapse completely, too low and the filament gets caught in the extruder).
- Bed temperature: 40c. TPU has no problems sticking to the textured PEI bed. In fact, it sticks a bit too well. Dropping the bed temp helps it release, but I still tend to need to spray a little IPA on the bed to get it to free up. (I’m planning to try dropping to 30c, or even unheated bed, and see how that goes.)
I also tweaked my regular “process” profile a bit:
- Quality > Avoid crossing walls: On. (Helps reduce stringing.)
- Speed > First layer: 15 mm/s.
- Speed > First layer infill: 35 mm/s.
- Speed > Other layer speeds (all of them): 35 mm/s.
- Speed > Overhang speeds (10%, 25%, 50%, 75%): 0, 30, 25, 20 mm/s.
- Speed > Bridge (external and internal): 35 mm/s.
- Speed > Acceleration (normal printing, outer wall, inner wall, top surface): 3000 mm/s^2.
Sovol’s filament profile drops the max volumentric speed, but TPU benefits from not just slow speeds, but also consistent ones, and forcing the speeds to be the same in the process profile gave me better quality prints. Same for lower acceleration a bit, though I’m less convinced of the effect there.
Of course, YMMV. These are just the settings that work well for me for some TPUs I’ve tried (Paramount, Inland). Maybe the standard ACE TPU profile will work nicely for you, and that’s great if so! If not, don’t be afraid to tweak it and run some test prints. 
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tnk you… i’ve thought i was mad after reading that standard tpu process is good… because i printed a cover for my phone and it was a monstruosity of stringing and collapsed bridge and overhangs
no probs except stringing, elephant foot, collapsed overhang and shitty bridge… basically tpu is exits from the nozzle right
Of course, every filament is a little different, but this one works quite well. A picture might help us assess the performance. Often, the filament simply needs to be dried.
Have you dried your filament…TPU..??
FWIW, I would suggest folks try the stock TPU profile before tweaking it. But I did, and it didn’t work well for me, so I wanted to share what did. Agree it definitely varies by filament though.
Also, yes, drying is important, especially with TPU. I weighed a brand new spool before and after drying, and it lost 12g of in the process.
It’s possible that the ACE-TPU profile could still be improved. But I agree with Lion. It works better than the Generic profile. The latter is much too fast.
Oh, good point. I didn’t even try the general “Generic TPU” profile at all.