Turning Up the Heat on HT-PLA’s Marketing

PLA is probably the most-printed filament on the market these days, and is there any wonder? It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it doesn’t poison you (as quickly as its competitors, …read more

Jun 10, 2025 - 01:10

Turning Up the Heat on HT-PLA’s Marketing

PLA is probably the most-printed filament on the market these days, and is there any wonder? It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it doesn’t poison you (as quickly as its competitors, anyway). What it doesn’t do very well is take the heat. Polymaker’s new HT-PLA formulation promises to solve that, and [My Tech Fun] put those claims to the test in a recent video.

Polymaker claims its HT-PLA is heat-stable up-to 150 C, but still prints as easily as standard PLA at up to 300 mm/s. By “heat stable” they mean able to maintain dimensions and form at that temperature when not under any load, save perhaps its own weight. If you need high-temp mechanical properties, they also offer a glass-fiber infused HT-PLA-GF that they claim is heat resistant up to 110 C (that is, able to withstand load at that temperature) which is hard to sneeze at, considering you you could print it on a stock Ender so long as you tossed a hardened nozzle on it.

Now it’s not a free lunch: to get the very best results, you do need to anneal the parts, which can introduce shrinkage and warping in HT-PLA, but that’s where HT-PLA-GF shines. If you want to see the results of the tests you can jump to 19:27 in the video, but the short version is that this is mechanically like PLA and can take the heat.

The verdict? If you like printing PLA and want to shove something in a hot car, you might want to try HT-PLA. Otherwise, it’s just like PLA. It prints like PLA, it looks like PLA, and when cold it behaves mechanically like PLA, which we suppose was rather what Polymaker was going for. There is no word yet on whether the additives that make it high-temp increase off-gassing or toxicity but since this stuff prints like PLA and can stand a little airflow, it should be easy to ventilate, which might make for fewer trade-offs when building an enclosure.

What do you think, will you be trying HT-PLA anytime soon? Let us know in the comments.