Printing ABS under fire fighting system

[Arafat Terron]

Hello everybody,

I have a question and was wondering if any of you have any advice or experience with the matter. We have a Z18 at work that is placed exactly under a fire fighting system sprinkle thing. We have been printing with PLA lately and we have had any problem so far. Today we received some ABS spools for testing and I was wondering if there is any chance that the ABS fumes could activate the fire fighting system which could get me into serious troubles. The Z18 is placed in a small office that does have AC, I think there is only the grid that let the cold air into the office. Should we need an additional fume extractor?

[Ryan Carlyle]

ABS fumes are basically just a little bit of residual monomer left in the polymer. Mostly just trace amounts of styrene. That shouldn't set off any kind of fire detection system.

What kind of firefighting system is it? Standard commercial style ceiling sprinklers? Those are set off by high heat levels. Standard residential style smoke detectors? Those are set off by small particles (smoke or dust) in the air. Either of those are 100% unaffected by a 3d printer unless you actually catch the printer on fire. (In which case, you WANT the fire system to go off.)

If your office has some other super fancy kind of firefighting system, you're probably still fine, but it might be worth doing some research. For example, an IR flame detector MIGHT potentially consider a hot nozzle to be a small fire. But that seems super unlikely. The viewing angles on that don't make sense, if nothing else.