3D-Printed Pyrography Using PLA/Wood Filaments

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Abstract
Wood-filled PLA filaments enable 3D pyrography in material-extrusion (MEX) printing, in which tonal gradients and surface shading are generated in situ by controlling the thermal history during deposition, thereby avoiding post-processing or multi-material strategies. This enables the direct embedding of motifs and graded shading for customized product design, while also allowing appearance stabilization for repeatable manufacturing of wood-filled PLA parts. In this work, PLA/olive-wood (OW) composite filaments containing 0-20 wt.% OW (particle size < 180 µm) were manufactured and printed into 20 mm discs using MEX. The extrusion (nozzle) temperature was varied from 180 to 280 °C, and the printing speed was set to 20 and 200 mm/s to modulate thermal exposure. Surface color was quantified as L * , a * , b * from visible absorbance measurements (400-700 nm) converted into CIELAB coordinates. Percentual differences were assessed using the CIEDE2000 metric ΔE 00 . The results demonstrated that increasing nozzle temperature progressively reduced lightness L * , and under severe conditions, a marked loss of chroma ( a * and b * ), particularly for higher OW contents. Low-speed printing (20 mm/s) amplified the pyrographic effect, reaching strong perceptual contrasts (maximum ΔE 00 ≈ 9 at 280 °C for 20 wt.% OW), whereas high-speed printing (200 mm/s) mitigated extreme darkening and maintained more moderate, controlled color differences (typically ΔE 00 < 3). Accordingly, ΔE00< 3 can be used as a practical “color-stable” target for uniform-looking parts, whereas ΔE00= 3-9 provides clearly distinguishable shades for pyrographic marking/shading. These findings defined practical process windows to either maximize tonal contrast for 3D pyrography or stabilize the appearance for consistent manufacturing of PLA/OW parts.

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