3D Printing Material Comparison Calculator

This calculator gives a bonus for margin above your stated minimum requirement -- a material that clears your tensile strength requirement by a wide margin scores slightly higher than one that just barely meets it, up to a capped bonus. That reflects real engineering practice, where designing with some margin above a bare minimum requirement protects against print-quality variation and real-world loads that can exceed the nominal spec.

Selected tensile, selected HDT, and selected elongation report the fixed physical properties of whichever material you've chosen in the Material dropdown -- they describe what the material actually is, not how it compares to your requirements. Adjusting your requirement inputs changes the score and the requirements-met count, which measure how well that fixed set of properties satisfies what you asked for, but it doesn't change the material's underlying properties.

The best match is whichever material scores highest across all four weighted categories combined, not the single highest performer on any one property. A material with outstanding heat resistance but a cost well above your budget, or elongation far short of a flexibility requirement you don't actually have, can score lower overall than a more balanced material -- the ranking rewards meeting your full set of requirements, not maximizing any one axis in isolation.

No -- they're representative reference figures for standard FDM-printed parts, not a specific manufacturer's datasheet values. Real filament brands vary around these numbers based on their formulation, and the actual strength of a printed part depends heavily on print settings like layer adhesion, infill percentage, and print orientation, none of which this calculator models. Treat the comparison as a starting point for narrowing down a material family, then confirm the specific brand's published datasheet before finalizing a design.