ESC cooling

The more I think of it, the more similar esc cooling and cpu cooling methods seem to be. Has anyone used or thought of using peltier chips? Stacking a few on the electronics and then put the heatsink on seems like it may help out considerably. I wonder if it would be feasible with the amount of current required to power it and if there would be any drawbacks to them, ie. condensation,potential failure scenarios, cost.

[BrianG]

Yeah, it's been brought up a few times. There are a few limitations, such as: sensitive to vibrations, consume runtime robbing current, can only have so much of a temp differential between sides, etc. The general consensus seems to be that it would take more effort to implement than it would be worth.

[zeropointbug]

I have thought about it, and discarded the idea afterwards. The drawbacks more than out weight the benefits; such as what will you power it with? ALL the energy taken away from the ESC environment(temperature) MUST be also dissipated away from the ESC as well as heat (which requires a very decent heatsink). Also, any power (at least 50 watts to make it useful) taken from the main battery to power the peltier chip, will take away performance from the motive force to move the truck. Also, cooling down an esc does not increase power capability much, it merely keeps it cool (especially when sucking power from mains pack)... I could go on more about this... cost/benefits, reliability factor, condensation (opens up a whole plethora of other problems), etc.

Your best bet is to just use extra heatsinks on esc's such as Quark series esc's, which, happens to be the only esc that I can think of that you would be able to apply peltier cooling to.

Many people here, and I for one, have modified esc's like the Quark with a much better thermal interface inside the FET's, making cooling MUCH more efficient. After doing simple mods like this to an esc, the esc is leaps and bounds better than before, and can handle anything you throw at it.

The only application I can see this being useful is on a large R/C like Baja 5B electric conversion that has a decent esc, but occasionally have heating problems, then a 50watt peltier would not affect the power of the LARGE battery on something like that. But you are still stuck with other problems like the condensation factor i mentioned. Overall, it's not worth it.