Quote:
Originally Posted by tahreer
hey..
We have this case during tests …the wire witch connected
from the power distributor to the jaguar … suddenly becomes too hut... I wonder if anyone knows why that happens???
thanx...
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Since others have already addressed the most likely root causes (wire is too small or the Jag is blown), i figured i'd chime in and answer your actual question - why that happens.
Every wire is really a resistor, although the resistance is usually extremely small. As you try to pass electricity through any resistor, you end up with some loss - all the power doesn't make it to its destination. That's because it takes effort to push the electricity through the resistance, and that effort is lost as heat. It's this basic principle that lets things like incandescent light bulbs work - they use a filament with high resistance to generate a lot of excess heat. So much heat, in fact, it glows.
Now, imagine your typical stranded wire used on the robot. Each strand in the wire has some small resistance. When you have multiple strands of wire running in parallel (forming a single wire with insulation around it - hence the stranded wire name we give it), the wires act as resistors in parallel, which end up reducing the overall resistance of the system - the reciprocal of the equivalent resistance is equal to the sum of the reciprocal's of the individual resistances. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_...allel_circuits for more details on how this works.
So, when you have a small wire, with only a few strands, your resistance is much higher than a larger wire with many more strands. If your wire is too small for the amount of power sent through it, it will start to get very hot. In some cases, this could cause insulation to melt or start an electrical fire. Even larger wires can get warm if you approach the rated limits for that gauge wire.
So, now that you know why the wire if hot, you can do what everyone else already suggested and replace it with an appropriate gauge wire!