Xioneer 3D Prints PEEK Part on Bambu Lab H2D

August 8, 2025 by Joris Peels 3D Printers 3D Printing 3D Printing Materials

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Xioneer Systems has successfully 3D printed a PEEK part on the Bambu Lab H2D. The company successfully got the Victrex AM 200 material to print. Using Xioneer’s own VXL 111 soluble support and annealing it post-print, they got it to work. The company will now try to get PEEK to work with the AMS material management box that comes with most H2Ds.

Robert McKay, who is the Head of New Business Development, Additive Manufacturing and New Technologies at Victrex, was impressed.

“When you said you printed PEEK-based VICTREX AM 200 on a Bambu Lab, I didn’t believe it—until you showed us the parts! The lower melt temperature and improved flow of the LMPAEK polymer made it possible, while still supporting VXL 111 soluble supports and post-print crystallization by annealing. Impressive work!”

Xioneer responded to this by saying, “For us, it was a reminder to always keep on doing things that don’t seem reasonable in theory at first.”

Bambu Lab H2D. Image courtesy of Bambu Lab.

It is indeed impressive that PAEK materials are notoriously tricky to 3D print. Often, the materials have issues with crystallization and are challenging to process within the correct temperature windows. Spotting and brittle parts are a regular occurrence, even in high-temperature material extrusion machines. Large parts are especially difficult. But, given the high-performance nature of the PAEK family of materials, people will keep trying. Often intrinsically self-extinguishing, implantable in the body, radiopaque, strong, with good dimensional stability, sterilizable, low outgassing, and excellent chemical resistance, these materials keep working when others fail. Especially in high-temperature applications and high-strength parts, this is an expensive high-performance material.

Victrex’s AM 200 material has been designed from the ground up as a PEEK that would work for material extrusion. With better intra-layer bonding and dimensional stability, this semi-crystalline material is meant to be relatively easy to process. The LMPAEK variant is called low-melt polyaryletherletone (LMPAEK) or commercially known as Victrex UDT AS4-143-34. Typically, your nozzle temperatures need to be around 420°C to process PEEK; this could work at 380°C or 390°C. Chamber temperature could potentially also be lower. So how did Xioneer do it?

Christoph Strasser, Xioneer´s Head of 3D Printing told us how, they did it and surprisingly,

¨We did not change anything. Most importantly, you need to consider the max nozzle temp of 350 °C on the H2D. In essence, we set all parameters to max, except the fan, which is set to 0. Typically, we print AM200 at around 400 °C and with much more potent heaters around 150 W. Thus, printing is only possible very slowly around 25-50 mm/s, depending on layer height and nozzle diameter. The material sticks well on the standard PEI sheet. Or we use our VXL 111 as a raft.¨

The company will continue working on the development. Strasser thinks, “It’s surely not going to be possible to print massive parts here. But gears or other typical small PEEK parts? Sure.” The company also hopes to deeper its work and work with Hexagon´s Digimat-AM to look at part properties.

VXL 111. Image courtesy of Xioneer Systems.

The company used its VXL 111 as support. VXL 111 is a soluble support material. You’ll need to warm a bath to 65 °C and then use Xioneer supplied detergent. Afterward, the supports should wash off. It has been tough to develop support for PEEK. And when they do exist, they tend to be challenging to remove.

Great stuff by Xioneer that showcases a future that could really propel 3D printing forward. Now I do think that you may have some problems with a lot of your electronics if you do this often. And many parts will probably fail. But this is an accessible large-format 3D printer. A hardened version of that 3D printer, which would work for longer and manage flow in the chamber better, would not necessarily be that expensive. Also, Bambu could stop doing its silly laser cutting stuff and make a super reliable high-temperature machine as well. That could be an actual, affordable production unit for businesses.

But, it’s clear that in a few years we could be 3D printing PEEK, PEKK, PEI, and other high-performance materials off of very affordable systems. That could put making affordable parts with incredible properties at arm’s length for tens of thousands. It also means that you could be making technical PA 12 or other PPA parts at home and turn that into a technical parts print farm business. Companies could purchase and utilize affordable systems to produce highly demanding technical components. For maintenance and MRO teams, PEEK and other similar high-temperature materials provide decisive benefits that many other materials don’t have in chemical resistance and strength. We’re also going to assume that any printer good enough for PEEK will also be good for PA and other tricky engineering materials. Printing these materials on affordable systems could really mean a huge expansion in the capabilities of print farms and 3D printers within businesses.