How would 3D printing plastics - ABS, PLA - behave in liquid nitrogen, or at cryogenic temperatures in general?
Apparently they should get brittle, but surprisingly i wasn't able to find anything specific.
Anyone done any tests, or used reprapped parts in some really cold builds?
Not being able to easily find an answer, i decided to try it out myself - a couple samples of PLA, and a couple of ABS:
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It went a bit better than i expected - the frozen parts feel almost the same as non-frozen ones.
The feel response and effort of bending one is pretty much the same, maybe a little bit stiffer.
The only difference is when pushed hard - warm ones crack or deform, while frozen ones shatter violently.
Apparently, ABS and PLA are good if you want to print, say, a model of superconducting maglev train, but are a bad choice for some machinery or support structure to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures.
