Does motor temp affect performance?

[thefro526]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

If you are SURE that nothing bad has happened to your drive train and that you are just overheating your motors, then I fully recommend buying a 24 can case of "Freez it" or similar product and icing the motors before and after every match*.

I recommend keeping ahead of the heat because by the time you feel that the outside can of a CIM is warm the inside is HOT HOT HOT. Freeze 'em early, Freeze 'em often. That'd be my motto. If it weren't illegal, I'd put a small hole in the can of the motor and drizzle the liquid from the can right into the motor body itself that way the evaporating liquid would directly cool the bits of the motor that need cooling the most. As it is, you'll have to cool the case and depend on thermal conductivity to do the rest.

Joe,

Is there a noticeable performance gain by cooling motors like this, or is it just a good preventive measure? I was always told that cooling the motors in such a way could damage the motor, but your post has sparked my interest. Maybe I'll pick up a can as an experiment.

Originally Posted by EricVanWyk

I'm betting that they got hot -> increased resistance -> decreased efficiency -> got hotter, but the real cause for your drop in power was your battery giving up. Running that hot is not good, but it probably isn't your only issue.

I would guess that some of it was due to Battery levels as well. In 2008 our robot was a real battery drainer, and as we would go through the elims our batteries never got the full charge time (Close matches, and we only had 2 or 3 batteries) so we would go out to the field with weak batteries. This wreaked all kinds of havoc on our robots performance, especially in autonomous mode.