Creative uses for servos?

[Veselin Kolev]

Originally posted by WakeZero
Rookie power

The airflow was superb, we didn't overheat once after they were installed, and being able to switch from high to low gear allowed us to have a quick/precise autonomous mode followed by a powerful low gear. It all worked out nicely =)

Quite impressive transmission. Even more so for a rookie team. But on the subject of motor cooling, we never did it. You think it would help, but not really. Blowing air on the motor doesn't do much. The motor doen't have enough surface area. Even if you make a custom heat sink and use silicon thermal gel, you still won't do much. You'll cool the outside of the motor, so you'll cool the magnets. You don't really cool the wire windings, and that's what you want to cool. Even if you manage to cool the wires, you won't lower the temperature too much, so you won't really improve the conductance enough to ever notice. Cooling works, but not with fans. For example, team 254 injected liquid oxygen (or something like that, i forgot exactly) from a can into their motors right before competing. This cooled the wires to about 250 kelvin (-23 C) or so they say, and I think that is close. This gives their robot a hugh advantage during autonomous mode, since they can really shoot up the ramp. But after a minute the motors heat up again.