Motor Cooling

Motor Controller Documentation - Mechanical - Confluence (atlassian.net)

Motor controllers will require cooling due to losses incurred in the process of inverting the HV DC bus from our battery to the 3 phase power required to drive our BLDC motors. See section 7 of the WS22 user manual for more information (link above).

Requirements:

Analysis was done for MSXIV regarding motor cooling requirements, which can be found Motor Controller Cooling Calculations and Motor Controller Heat Dissipation. Most of the analysis still applies, here is the TLDR:

• Thermal system shall handle 15W continuous for cruising

• Thermal system shall handle a 100W transient for 2 minutes when climbing hills or passing

• Cold plate should be kept below 70C at all times, past which the controller will throttle itself by limiting the current linearly until shutdown at 80C

• Can be mounted in any orientation but must be in a dry area of the vehicle

• Mounted in a location and orientation to minimize the length of the HV harness, and provide enough clearance for cable bends as the thick cables can be quite stiff

Interface:

From the motor controller mechanical drawing, the cold plate is comprised of the entire bottom of the controller with a size of 250mm x 117mm. Mounting is achieved by 8 M4 screws, all with a max insertion depth of 14mm. The cooling solution should cover the entire cold plate. With natural convection alone and no heatsink, the controller can dissipate ~5W continuous. STEP file from the manufacturer is in the documentation link above.

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Would be cool if y’all could add onto this page with your design decisions