Cooling ways for drive motors?

Hi CD. what are you thinking about it??







This is just an idea for cooling drive motors during match/practice.

I don’t want to add a fan to the robot.

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Fans are allowed on the robot. Point some decent-sized muffin fans at the motors and you should be all set.

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I think such a simple solution makes much more sense than using a fan :thinking:

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Oh god, next season are people going to be asking “What’s your drag coefficient?” when pitscouting?

(Seriously though, this is really cool and looks incredibly interesting)

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At an outside demo a few months ago our drive motors got very hot from a combination of being in use for multiple hours and being in the sun. One thing we did to help them cool faster was put rubbing alcohol on a rag and rubbing it on the motors. The quick evaporation helps cool it down 2-3 degrees. It wasn’t a great solution but it’s good for last second emergencies.

Very nice idea but alcohol shouldnt get on electronics :grimacing:

I feel like you wouldn’t ever be going fast enough for this to really make a difference? It is interesting however, but cooling fans make a lot more sense.

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Maybe the 70% stuff can harm electronics, but 90% + should be safe if you get a little (or even a fair bit) on a circuit board. It may take the silk screen off plastics and some boards though. Nothing on the circuit board is really going to be hot enough to ignite and we use relatively low voltages in FRC so I won’t worry too much about anything going up in smoke. Not that you should go dumping it on electronics…

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That looks like maybe 0.5" x 2" of intake cross section. At 20 FPS (probably too aggressive for a tank drive), you’ll get ~8.5CFM of flow. You’d be better off with a fan outputting less than 8.5 CFM constantly, given that you’ll not be at top speed at all times.

You can get 40 CFM out of a 2.36" square fan

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This will do more to spray grease off your gears than it will to cool your motors. Neat concept and creative thinking tho.

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Pretty sure the psychological effects of going against a robot with a sweet diffuser lookin thing increase your chances of winning a match by at least 10%

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While an interesting idea, speaking from experience I’m pretty sure the most likely result from adding a shroud like this would be throwing a bunch of dirt/dust/carpet fiber into your motors/gearbox, thus resulting in even worse performance (due to the added “insulation”).

During a match heat shouldn’t really be an issue for drive motors, and if it is, you might be using too aggressive of a gear ratio.

During extended practice I could certainly understand motors getting hot though. I would recommend either adding fans as others have mentioned (even though you don’t want to) or, do what my team does and get a portable shop fan and just blow it onto the motors between matches or during breaks. Motors can be slow to cool down on their own due to their thermal mass, so cooling during downtime can help prevent heat buildup over time.

Incidentally, as other have pointed out, adding DC “muffin” fans, is pretty easy, just 3D print yourself a bracket and you can wire them directly to the VRM or PDP (you can even technically run multiple fans safely off a single “custom circuit”, they don’t require motor controllers.

While not for cooling motors, we even went so far as to get a pair of 15000rpm server fans to cool the OrangePi 5 we used for our vision system this year (nothing else got it cool enough, there weren’t many good thermal solutions for them at the time) and it was really easy to set up.

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This is exactly why I say fans. You just won’t be moving fast enough for robot action alone to pull air in like that.

Or, some motors do have a place for a pneumatic fitting.

Yep, we wash PCBs in ethanol in an ultrasonic cleaner…

We will sometimes just shoot each of our drive motors with an air gun for a bit between matches if the motors are very hot to the touch. Works well enough

Motors aren’t electronics.
Yes, alcohol can get on electronics (@CarlosGJ has stated)

Thanks for all your comments. I just wanted to do something different. This is like a fantasy bot or something.

don’t forget to add a big fan on the back to make the robot go faster :saluting_face:

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It may be a fun exercise to make the gearbox have it’s own fan driven by the motors. Why not ?

:slight_smile:

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Only if its stated primary (51%) purpose is for “cooling”