Stepper motors cooling techniques ⚙️
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 มิ.ย. 2024
- Trying to find the best cooling setup for stepper motors with heatsinks, fans, blowers and even holes.
Spreadsheet: github.com/stijnsprojects/Ste...
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:15 Working principle
00:52 Testing method
01:05 Results
03:32 Outro - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
i would like to warn everyone about drilling holes though. The gap between the rotor and the stator is incredibly narrow. Making it free of dust and dirt is very important, otherwise friction can ruin your day.
Valid comment, it makes the motors more 'fragile' but it's still worth looking at the results and thinking about other solutions in my opinion.
Filtering the air before blowing it through the motor should reduce the chance of dust falling into the gap. Powerful enough fans should keep the dust away from the insides of motor
Edit: I forgot that fan will not always be working
@@TrueHolarcticmaybe add a flappy membrane to the exhaust holes that only opens when the fan is blowing and closes when fans stop?
@@a.c.2659 i dont think it will so much help, when fan turn on, he suck all dust from air into a stepper.
This was incredibly helpful and we have now changed the way we cool a critical stepper motor in one of our machines. Used to cool with heatsink from the back but now we pass air around the stepper with heat sinks placed around it. Works better :)
3M's 9448A is not thermal transfer tape and is not made for heatsinks. It comes with many of cheap heatsinks because it is thin and cheap and sorta works, but work well it does not. 3M's 8805 would be the correct thermally conductive adhesive for this application.
the difference would have been just noticeable..
Very interesting and instructive video.
I just needed this information for the design of future robotic actuators, thanks!
you can find special mineral oil to transfer from windings to outer shell, needs a hold for input, just a tiny bit of oil will change the transfer a lot, pro motor thermal oil uses some kind of suspension maybe just fine iron to aid heat transfer, search for grintech cooling oil formula to know more.
Good experiments. Very helpful. Please try water cooled heat sick next time.
Great insight to cooling stepper motors. You helped me alot. Thanks buddy
I stick stepper driver AL heatsinkS on the black stator housing 4 sides..works great for me.
Thanks for info! Great job.
Great video, thanks for testing
but why ?
normal operating temperature of all standard NEMA steppers is 95°C (you can find it in manual). there is no need to cool them at all.
they are meant to run hot and it's totally fine for them.
I think the rational cooling method is by add heat sink on the side area, and blow it with airflow.
drilling hole to stepper body is worse idea, because it is allowed DUST to enter in. it may cause problem for long run period.
You was inspiring me to make cooling system for my Nema 34 stepper motor, thanks dude, your awesome.
Great test and very useful information! Sub'd!
Nice test!
Great video!
In order to keep dirt and stuff out of the stepper...just a fan blowing across at an angle seems to do the best, but for best cooling holes and airflow thru the steppers is the way to go
thank you so much for this.
Interesting test. The easy solution might be a 5015 fan with a printed shroud around 4 sides of the motor. All the airflow would contribute to heat removal.
Note that steppers don't need cooling unless they're pushed to the limits. Most motors are happy up to 80C, so cooling one that is far below that, won't make any practical difference.
I'm thinking that for effective cooling, you need small heatsinks on the sides with air OR for water cooling a small tube jacket around the stator instead of on the back then
Try holes fan and a polite module with cooling side towards fan with a heat sink on the hot side....think the results would be interesting
Why are your motors getting so hot in the first place though? Are you running too high of current on your drivers?
That was really interesting!
How about heat pipes to a heat sink from the sides?
great video, you may know this already but running too cool can actually get your worse results on your speed/torque curve just like running too hot will. you probably wouldn't see negative effects of cooling though unless your ambient was really low.
Thank you
A smallholding owner's walk-behind engine driven plow (plough) was worried about overheating. So he drilled holes in the ducting carrying the cooling fan directed-air!
I would like to look into statorade for cooling, it's a magnetic oil made for ebike motors. I'm not sure if a stepper motor would work correctly with a magnetic oil inside
I have some concerns about statorade that I have to investigate before I can make a final judgement. The problem is that the magnetic oil affects the working of the motor because it changes the field distribution in the rotor-stator-gap. I do think the motor will still work because the oil has a higher magnetic reluctance.
Even if in an enclosed setup this way of cooloing is not the best, the ideeas worth noted.
If these tiny stepper motors are getting hot enough to require active cooling solutions, you're pumping too much current into them.
There are two things you should do
1) Check the rating of your stepper motor, and reduce the current to be within the target range.
2) Utilize a stepper drive feature called idle current reduction that reduces the current applied to the motor to a set percentage when the motor is not moving.
That is partially true, but people do look for cooling methods (fast 3D printing for example) and this is why I wanted to share my results. The discussion of how hard you should be on your motors is something different.
With a heated enclosure you can begin to see overheating issues even running well within the stepper motors specs.
And besides this all, some of us like to go nuts.
@@Erowens98 Probably why I keep layer shifting whenever I try to print polycarbonate? Cabinet getting well-baked?
@@soundspark It could be cable related too, but most likely heat related if the steppers are inside the enclosure.
Water cooling followed by heatsink+fan is my opinion before watching.
Based on the results in the video, the water block should be mounted on the side, not the back.
Are you flemish? Curious cuz of the accent :)
That's correct
If the acceleration - or the inertia - of the movement of your 3D printer head is a problem, then why not use a SCARA robot, or better yet, a parallel arm robot. Not only do these have less inertia than cartesian systems, but also pose no limit to how big the motor can be. I think you are "carving in the shit"
My video is an analysis of cooling methods for stepper motors' I'm not saying that anyone should do anything with it, I'm just reporting the results.
I spent 5 years as a field engineer working with electromechanical systems driven exclusively by stepper motors. Some of these machines ran 24/hr a day. Guess how many passive or active coolers I saw on stepper motors…0. That also happens to be the number of stepper motors I had to replace.
You should NOT attempt to manage heat on a stepper motor. You SHOULD choose the correct stepper motor for the job.
This advice is either by an amateur or by a pro preying on the ignorance of amateurs.
For the industry this is totally true but if you look at people who build things for fun like very fast 3D printers, they do have motors that run hot and look for ways to cool them. Also it is just a test to find out what works and what does not, what you do with the information is up to you.
okay man, no idea why you react so offensive to an educational video. And on top of that researchers and engineers developing motors will always perform such tests on existing motors and analyse the impact.
There are definitely niche usecases, usually on small scale/prototypes. Where active cooling is helpful. Just because you haven't seen or thought of them doesn't mean they aren't out there.
Of course for an industrial application where reliability is the most important part they get a stepper motor rated with a heavy safety margin. But maybe, for example, you're a design engineer trying to accelerate your prototyping by accelerating your desktop 3d printer. You dont want to add extra weight so a larger stepper motor is undesirable. So running a smaller stepper motor at the edge or even slightly beyond its spec may be a valid option. In those cases active cooling can be very helpful.
This is coming from a mechanical deisgn engineer.
regardless of any opinion on whether you should be, it's very useful to know the effects of these methods.
You're right, but some nieche printers run 48v on the steppers, And since reliability isn't paramount as in the industry,. they're run at/over the specified current rating.
These steppers are not made for that amount of wattage put through them, and *will* fail unless cooled.
And why don't we upgrade the steppers? Bigger doesn't mean faster, and for a 3d-printer we barely look at the torque. if we want to go faster we need to use Servos, and controlling these motors isn't as easy and they're atleast 10x the price.