Heat and Power Problems

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By Tien Dang

Introduction
Power level, power lost, and heat product are the problems that we need to maintain during testing and demoing period. To maintain the power level, we need to use a voltage regulator (https://www.arxterra.com/voltage-regulator), but power lost and heat product are always there, all we can do is deduce them to a minimum level; we can’t get rid of them.

Reducing Heat Product
When using a step down voltage regulator, a massive production of heat will be produced. The reason of this heat problem is because the different Voltage of the battery (7.4 V) and the output of Voltage regulator (6V). This difference will form extra energy, which is heat. For a long period of time, this heat will be a thread and cause fire if we do not deduce it. To prevent this problem from happening, we installed two small heat sinks under and one small fan next to the Voltage regulator.

figure 1 

Figure 1: Voltage regulator andHeat Sinks

figure 2

Figure 2: Fan and Battery

Heat sinks do not need power, so we do not need to apply any power to them; all we need that is attach them under the Voltage regulator so they can suck out the heat however the fan needs power to turn it on. For our project, we will use a separate battery (as show in Fig. 1) to minimize the power drain from the main power source.

Minimizing Power Lost
Beside the power lost due to heat converting while use Voltage regulator (which is unavoidable), the power may lost while the robot is stand by, but the power is still in the power outlet. To prevent this, we attached an On/Off button to the main battery. So we do not have to worry about the power lost while the robot is standing by.

figure 3 

Figure 3: A switch is attached to battery

Conclusion
Heat and power lost are unavoidable, but we can minimize them. Adding button to main battery, installing heat sink under Voltage regulator, and connecting a small fan next to Voltage regulator are solutions of our team. After the tests that we performed to test the movement of the Hexapod, we could see that these solutions are working very well. The voltage regulator is not getting hot or smoked, and battery can be used over ten minutes without running out of power.