My VESC has been having overheating issues, so I’ve given it a minimal amount of cooling assistance. 2 steel plates, some drilled holes for 2.5 x 16mm bolts (countersunk) and a laptop CPU heatsink soldered to the top plate. I’ve also sliced some venting into the case. It’s better than nothing.
2 Likes
It is something as you say. If that really is steel I would throw it away and heat glue the heat sink directly. Aluminium or copper is all you want between heat source and heat sink
Just to clear.i didn’t mean heat glue as in heat glue gun but as in heat compound you have for pc heatsinks. There is a kind that is also glue. Anybody know it’s name?
Dont worry, I know what you mean. I thought about using that stuff, but I severely doubted its ability to stay glued. Nothing on an eskate ever stays glued. So I wanted something that I could solder the heatsink to, which will never come off. I also wanted plates on the top and bottom, and have them connected, so I could cool both sets of MOSFETS. I did a 10km hard ride (lots of hard acceleration and braking) with it yesterday and it was wonderful, never felt it losing power like it used to.
I agree that steel isn’t perfect (I actually thought it was aluminum until I tried to cut it) but it is working really well so far. I will probably switch to aluminum as soon as I find a sheet of the appropriate size and thickness.
It’s called thermal compound usually, think it’s usually silver mixed with whatever to make it into goo.
1 Like
I have tried that stuff a lot and the kind that glues stays hard. But I have never tried it in an environment with such vibrations as an esk8. A piece of steel will help obviously. As any mass you attach that can drain heat faster than air. But the conductivity is so low that my bet is the heatsink is not getting any heat. That is why I recommend a metal tart moves the heat away. Keep us posted with your upgrades
I’ve thought about doing something similar to my setup if needed. But i’ve imagined doing a laptop style heat-sink with the heat pipes removing the heat to fins positioned somewhere with big airflow…but that envolves torch welding copper pipes so not an easy project.
1 Like
I considered that too. The heatsink I used was actually scavenged out of a laptop, but I removed the heat pipe because it ended up being impossible to make it all fit.