Vesuvius UHF Hotend

Vesuvius UHF is an ultra high flow FDM hotend to produce unprecedented deposition rates in large format and high speed 3D printing.

Vesuvius is produced fully in house with the use of our SLM machines, and uses a custom ceramic heating element to provide nearly 200W of power output up to 500C. The design also includes a water cooled heatbreak, reducing the profile of the hotend and allowing it to function in extreme chamber temperatures and with the most heat creep sensitive plastics.

This hotend is capable of printing at a steady 150mm^3/s flow rate with ABS, making it over 10x more capable than the V6/Mk.8 style hotends found on many off the shelf machines. This translates to nearly 0.75Kg/h of material deposition, rivaling many popular pellet extruders in deposition rate for a fraction of the upfront cost.

You may be asking, why not use pellets at this scale?

Often times, pellet should be used for certain large format applications (we are currently developing our own pellet extruder for release soon too), however there are a few reasons why pellets may not be the answer in all cases.

1. Toolhead mass. Pellet extruders are heavy, the nearest pellet extruders by volumetric flow on the market are nearly 20x heavier than a fully equipped Vesuvius hotend. Simply put; Vesuvius can move faster, accelerate harder, and be supported by machines that comparable performance pellet extruders cannot.

2. Flow control. Filament hotends (like Vesuvius) are true positive displacement systems. This means that when commanded to produce an exact extrusion amount they will do so reliably so long as there is no motor skipping or slipping at the extruder. Pellet extruders are not like this however, as back pressure, material consistency, melt temperature, and many more factors can influence extrusion rate. This makes filament hotends much more consistent and easier to achieve good results with, especially through smaller nozzles.

3. Upfront cost. Pellet extruders are expensive, especially high quality and reliable ones. Additionally, pellet extruders require hidden costs to operate, equipment like pellet conveyance units, storage hoppers, material dryers, and more can add onto those costs. As a result, tens of thousands of dollars must be saved with the use of pellets over filament before a company can even break even, and that doesn't consider the cost of setting up and maintaining the pellet handling infrastructure. Our company estimated that the total quantity of ABS we would need to print before we would break even on costs by switching to pellets at well over 3,500Kg.

4. Reliability. Pellet extruders are sensitive to changes. Any number of things such as a pellet feed jam, feed tube damage, barrel/screw degradation, feed sensor failure, pneumatic system failure, and more have the capacity to ruin a print. With a filament based system, all that is required is an unbroken feed of filament with a runout sensor to ensure that material is always available.

Vesuvius is optimized to provide extreme flow rates through a 0.8mm nozzle on existing gantries without large amounts of modification, allowing our customers to improve productivity at a fraction of the cost of other industry solutions. All that is needed to run Vesuvius is a compatible extruder (Orbiter 2 or Sherpa Mini mounting style), a machine capable of supporting a ~300g total toolhead mass, a heated nozzle coupler (CHC pro, volcano style heatblock, or our soon to arrive MeltGate nozzle adapter), and a control system that is able to control dual independent heater zones (or support additional mainboards like Klipper).

We are actively producing Vesuvius V4 hotends! If you are interested in purchasing a Vesuvius Hotend for yourself, you can find them in our store here.