Overheating of Roboclaw Solo 60A

General discussion of using Roboclaw motor controllers
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Basicmicro Support
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Joined: Thu Feb 26, 2015 9:45 pm
Re: Overheating of Roboclaw Solo 60A

Post by Basicmicro Support »

You are most likely experiencing overheating because your load is resistive. A purely resistive load will be a large amount of ripple current through the DC Link capacitors. This will cause them to overheat and shorten their life expectancy drastically.

You are effectively turning the Roboclaw into a switching regulator but without an inductor. That is probably bad for your electrolysis unit but it is definitely bad for the Roboclaw. Add a .1mH to 1mH inductor in series with the electrolysis unit. It needs to be rated for the current you will be driving so it will have to be a large inductor(physically). That should bring ripple current back down to something reasonable.

You are not running a regenerative load(eg a motor) so voltage clamping isnt an issue.

Also, your Solo unit must be mounted to a thermal mass that will conduct the heat from it. It will not support continuous 60amp operation without properly mounting it. Usually, it's mounted to a metal chassis but in your case, any large metal structure should be suitable.

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