Do you know ready-to-buy-cooling-blocks to put on a NEMA17 for watercooling?

Do you know ready-to-buy-cooling-blocks to put on a NEMA17 for watercooling?

while back there was a thread on e3d forums about a watercooled printer. the guy used some video card water cooling things, but they are quite expensive. sadly the original photos are gone now :frowning:
this is the original thread https://forum.e3d-online.com/index.php?threads/e3d-water-cooled-mod.53/

original parts: With the chamber temperatures I was aiming for, water cooling of the steppers was going to be needed and so I used water cooling blocks from Syscooling http://www.syscooling.com/
http://www.syscooling.com/products/Water_Blocks/89.html
http://www.syscooling.com/products/Water_Blocks/88.html

SC-VG11 and SC-VB11

Look what I found on AliExpress

@raykholo was about to post the same from ebay, but aliexpress is a bit cheaper: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Aluminum-Water-Liquid-Cooling-Block-for-CPU-Graphics-Radiator-Heatsink-40-40-12-/372034493545?hash=item569efbdc69:g:f0oAAOSwixhZhEOQ

On this note, I need a cheap reducer from the larger barb on that to the smaller barb on René’s water cooling jacket. Like 8mm–> 4mm.

I have some of the 40x40 processor cooling blocks for motors. Will work fine. Milling/sanding/grinding down the back aluminum plate of the motor will help with heat transfer since the cast surface usually isn’t very flat. Or use a thin silicone pad or something.

But… do you actually need to cool the motors? A standard NEMA 17 hybrid bipolar stepper will run at rated current in a 50C environment with 5 sides cooled via passive convection for >10,000 hours without damage. That’s literally how the rated current is determined – to produce a maximum safe temperature rise. Then if you actually use less than rated current (like most people do) or you add some heatsink surface area, you can run the motor in an even hotter environment. At 70% of rated current, the motor should be good in a ~85C heated chamber.

@Ryan_Carlyle i would be tempted to run the motor at 85C just as a test to see how long it takes before it fails but it is over 1 year…

@Cristian_Nicola I’ve had steppers running at ~75-80C surface temp, ~55C ambient temp in an enclosed printer for ages. Not quite as high as an 85C heated chamber, but not that far off either.

Even exceeding ratings won’t kill them all that fast. There’s a standard 10C safety margin, and then every additional 10C roughly cuts the coil insulation life in half. So if your target is a normal printer life of a few thousand hours, you can run the motor pretty dang hot.

https://dyzedesign.com/shop/liquidcooling/motor-liquid-cooling-block/

@Adam_Steinmark That’s a pretty good solution, although different motor lengths will require different M3 screws.

You know, really, what we SHOULD be doing is cooling the black stator stack in the middle of the motor, not the aluminum endcaps. Cooling the endcaps is better than nothing, but the coils are all in the middle, and the middle is what runs the hottest. So… you’d need, like, a soft wrap-around jacket or something. That would be REALLY effective.

My use case is a 22mm Nema 17 pancake stepper on a Titan with Rene’s water cooled v6 jacket inside an enclosed chamber.
I emailed E3D just before they announced Titan Aqua and asked about using the Titan in a heated chamber, they expressed concerns about the stepper motor and bearings, saying 80C is probably a reasonable max. So I’m not sure what they are doing with Aqua and I wonder what temps it will be able to reach. @E3D_Support @Sanjay_Mortimer1

I would agree that 80C is probably a reasonable max in general. That’ll certainly require extra cooling above regular 5-sided convection.

@Ryan_Carlyle do you think adding some fins on the sides of the motor will help? (something like this https://www.neontechnology.net/28-109-thickbox/northbridge-cooler-n8-deep-cool.jpg maybe?)

i’ve been wondering for a while about using some peltier things - the cool side on motor, the hot one towards the heated chamber. win-win!

@Ryan_Carlyle this summer I was helping upgrade a Taz 5 printer to print Ultem like NASA did, and when they added a heated enclosure they used compressed air to cool the middle of the steppers. Sort of simillar.

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@Cristian_Nicola Fins on the sides, sure, would definitely help. Gotta decide how to attach them though. I’ve done the peltier thing for motor cooling – it works pretty well. I had an ABS bracket supporting a motor inside a hot enclosure and didn’t want the bracket to warp when the motor was running ~85C. I eventually switched the bracket to polycarbonate and took the peltier off. The big concern with peltiers is that if the hot-side fan fails, you’re pretty hosed. Then it will actively HEAT the motor.

@Adam_Steinmark Compressed air on the inside of the motor would be insanely effective, but also a giant PITA to do! Makes way more sense to just put the motors outside the oven enclosure at that point. You can do that without infringing the Stratasys patent as long as you don’t use any “deformable insulators” where moving parts penetrate the oven envelope.

And that works great for everything except when one wants to do direct drive such as Titan + pancake stepper.

@Ryan_Carlyle ​ yeah and then you need a loud air compressor. Colleague told me that statasys patent expires this year, haven’t confirmed this though