Quote:
Originally Posted by xtian999
I hadn't meant that, but I see what you mean. In looking at possible ways to improve cooling, I noticed that the bent portion of the case could provide additional heat sinking if it had some thermal paste where it joins the plate. Also, better air flow inside if the mounting board were perforated. Any objections to swapping some pre-perfed material here?
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xtian - i'd recommend a decent sized finned heatsink on the bottom of the controller if you hadn't already planned on one. when you mention perforating the mounting board, i assume that you aren't (since a heatsink would cover the holes anyway).
my heatsink is just a bit larger than the controller base and has 3 high volume computer fans on it. I have a thermal sensor in the heatsink that touches the base of the controller - it reads about 12-15C above ambient temp when continuously pushing 200 amps on the highway. In the AZ summer heat, this setup has never allowed the controller to go into thermal cutback mode while accelerating with high amp draws.
regarding a fan for the controller internals, we previously determined that it wasn't necessary. The primary heat source are the switching components and their primary heat dissipation path is through the heatspreader to the base of the controller and heatsink. Circulating air through the controller wouldn't hurt, but the additional cooling surface area would likely be small compared to a finned heatsink.
The RTD explorer does show the thermistor temperature - if you install a fan for the internals, it should be easy to quantify its effectiveness.