Quick Q for "noob" at first

[KenWittlief]

there is cooling spray that you can buy, that has a long skinny tube like a can of WD40

you could use it between matches if you are cooking your motors, and the best thing, you can get the tube inside the motor fan openings and spray the windings inside (where it NEEDS to be cooled)

this is definately an 11th hour band-aid fix, not a design approach :^)

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Ken,
I have to add a caveat to your post. Cooling spray frequently will cause moisture to condense on cooled parts and when directed at bearings can wash lubricant out of the bearing. It is for these reasons that I highly recommend mechanical designers view and use the various white papers on drive design that are located in the white paper technical section of CD. (click on white papers on the title bar of this page.) JVN and Joe Johnson have both written excellent information on this subject. Also search technical posts for those written by Raul Olivera and Paul Copioli. All of these mentors have extensive experience in good, efficient design that makes the most of motor characteristics and efficiencies.

[Q Branch 4327]

Originally Posted by Conor Ryan

Heres something intresting, good topic.

Now most of the motors in the kit tend to run pretty cool, and the further away from stall torque they are, the cooler they will run. From experince and what I've heard from other teams is that if any motor in the Kit run hot, it's the small Fisher-Price motors (not the Really Big Cims, or the Mini Bike Motors) What do people do to combat that effectively?

Fans do take a bit of time to move the heat out of the area with the motor, whats an easy way of speeding this up? Add a heat sink. How? Take some copper or the best heat conducting material you can find, and wrap some of the motor in it. Add a fan or two, and it'll run nice and smooth. The kit muffin fans are good enough, if you wanna go and deck your robot out in all fancy computer case fans, check the electronics rules first, and check the connections on them.

I have a question for you we have plugged in fans to a main source of power and now they are burnt out would u have any clue why?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Q Branch 4327

I have a question for you we have plugged in fans to a main source of power and now they are burnt out would u have any clue why?

Can you give any more details on the connection and where the fans are? At a guess, you ran 'em through a breaker that was too big--I'd suggest no more than a 20A breaker, and several fans on it at that.

I've never seen a fan fry if connected to its speed controller's inputs, BTW.


Oh, and one other thing:

Holy ancient thread revival Batman!

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Q Branch 4327

I have a question for you we have plugged in fans to a main source of power and now they are burnt out would u have any clue why?

What kind of fans, what voltage are they designed to run at, and what voltage did you connect them to?

(After a quick reading of your question, my first impression was that you connected a 12 volt fan from the Kit of Parts to a wall outlet providing 120 VAC. That would indeed burn them out quite effectively.)