HDC2450 overheating and motor blocked

As you know, we are using HDC2450 with two DC motors (50A, 24VDC, 1000W) for our mobile robot by using it in tank-steering mode.

Sometimes, while I\'m driving the robot, one of the two motors block and do not turn anymore.
If I power off and then power on the system, the same motor starts to turn again and to work normally.

I noticed that when this problem happens, the motor is overheating. For this reason, I would like to ask you if the driver starts some particular routines when it detects that a motor is overheating and then it disables the channel for a period of time.

The motor works OK and it does not have any mechanical or electronic damage, so I can\'t understand why it blocks sometimes and why it starts again to work if I power off and then power on the system.

If the motor starts to overheat, my thought is it may be a sign of high current draw on the motor. If you have this connected to Roborun+ utility, opened in the run tab, does any of the fault status leds turn on when this happens?

Does the other motor get hot as well?

Both motors overheat at the same time and in the same way.
Rarely, it happens that both motors are blocked at the same time but more frequently it happens that only one motor is blocked. Then I have to switch off the system and power on it again to let the motor run.

No Fault status LED are on when this occurs, however, I see that there is no current in output throught the related channel. It seems something like the driver switch off the current for that motor.

Try the following.

In the roborun utility in the run tab, set one of your channels in the bottom right of browser to heat sink temperature. Not the MCU temp.

Monitor the temperature as the motors are running. When the motors cut off, what is the temperature recorded by roborun?

Also what is the firmware date of the controller? You can go to the console tab and type in ?fid and click send. Roborun should send back a firmware date.

I believe we have release firmware date code 053113.

If you have the older firmware, go ahead and update with this one and see if you have the same problem.

Couple of other things you can do to help us figure out the problem as well.

Try setting your max amps limits in your motor outputs to the max values. The default values are not the max.

Also when the motor is in near stall conditions, the motor current will be throttled back. The motor current will be limited, but the battery current will not.

To help us figure out what is being seen on your end, we would like for you to log the data for us with some values, and upload here so we can then analyze the data.

So in the run tab under channels, please select the following.

Motor command 1
Motor command 2
Motor power 1
Motor power 2
Battery amps
Motor amps 1
Motor amps 2
Temperature heatsink
Battery volts

If you can\'t get all of them we would at lease like the Motor command 1 and 2
Motor power 1 and 2
Motor amps 1 and 2
battery amps
battery volts.

Begin running your motors as you normally would. When the error occurs with your motors and they stop working, do not power off controller.

Click on the save button has the floppy disk icon on it under pause.

Then upload that file here and we can analyze the data to see what is going on.

I just finished a testing session, unfortunately, I didn\'t log the values you suggested because I\'ve read your answer too late. I\'ll log the values during next session and then I\'ll post them for sure.

However, the temperature is about 70°C when the motor block.

If the temperature is 70 degrees, then most likely what happened is that the controller went into thermal limiting. When this occurs, the controller attempts to stablize the controller internal temperature at 70 degrees or less. In order to do so, it gradually reduces the current in a manner that will allow the motor to run without shutting off the motor output completely.

By restarting the power, it gives the controller just enough time to cool down a little bit, thus keeping you out of the thermal limiting; but the end result is that it goes back.

The HDC units are pretty maintained for thermal protection. My thoughts is that at 50A, the controller shouldn\'t be anywhere near 70 degrees in a short period of time. Is there any type of cooling method used for the controller?

Thank you for your reply!

We are not using any kind of particular cooling system for the driver since it can provide up to 150A pere channel and our application only need 50-80A per channel.

Do you think we should cool it with a fan?

As stated before, since the amount of current draw is small, I can\'t imagine that additional cooling would be needed unless running for an extended amount of time.

If you watch the temperature of the heatsink from the time the motor starts operating, how long does it take before the temperature reaches about 70-71 degrees?

I did some additional tests and I realized that the temperature was not so high as I imagined before.

It reaches about 50 degrees and sometimes 55-60°C after heavy-duty tests.

During the last test, the motor blocked again and it didn\'t worked anymore.

I did extra checks and I discovered that the channel #2 on my HDC2450 is definetely dead.
The motor works very well if I directly connect it to the battery or to channel #1.

I upgraded the firmware, but nothing changed: channel #2 is dead. :(