Polymaker PolyLite LW-PLA PolyLite™ LW-PLA is a special foamed PLA designed to print with similar settings as regular PLA but with half the weight. What is the difference between active foaming and passive foaming? PolyLite™ LW-PLA is not an active foaming filament, which means it will not foam when extruded from the nozzle depending on the temperature. PolyLite™ LW-PLA is already pre-foamed. What are the pros and cons between active and passive foaming? Active foaming: You need to heavily modify your printing settings depending on the temperature and setup to compensate the foaming expansion of the material when printing.You need to print at very high temperature to achieve light weight results (~250˚), these high temperatures will create a lot of defects on the print such as stringing and blobs.At very high temperature, active foaming can achieve lighter print than passive foaming however the print may suffer of serious stringing defects. Passive foaming: You do not need to change any settings from your regular PLA settings (slight increase retraction) as PolyLite™ LW-PLA will offer light weight results even when printing at very low temperature (~190˚C).The lower the temperature the higher quality the print.
