It's a viable cooling strategy, if you can get the cool water where it's needed. It's the motor windings that generate the heat, so finding a way to get coolant as close to them as possible is key. When we've discussed this on another forum in the past people have looked at things like using copper pipe for windings and running the coolant through it, but this reduces the winding cross section and increases the resistance, so isn't ideal.
I have a small (6 - 7kW) BLDC outrunner motor that I am working on fitting internal water cooling to, using the parts used for PC coolers. The iron stator is fitted to an alloy bearing housing, so I've sketched up a new bearing housing design that can be machined from billet and include cooling passages. I'm hopeful that this will be reasonably effective at getting heat out of the stator, by cooling the big lump of alloy that it is fitted to.
Looking at the design of some of the other motors around it seems the same sort of mod could be done. One thing I've already learned is that the thermal path from the stator windings to the case is generally pretty poor on most BLDC motors that aren't inrunners (i.e motors with the stator on the outside and rotor on the inside), so cooling the outside of the case doesn't seem to have much effect on winding temperature.
Jeremy
--- In electricboats@yahoogroups.com, "justrayj" <justrayj@...> wrote:
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> I was considering the idea of adding water cooling an existing electric motor. As a chef we have aluminum pots wrapped with coils of soft copper. the pots can be heated the then water can be circulated in the copper coil to cool the contents quickly. Using the sea water inlet and exhaust outlet from the prior ICE with a small water pump attached to a copper coil wound around the engine would seem to be a simple method to water cool an existing electric motor without exposing it directly to water.
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> I am still reading your posts and learning, and it's a culinary solution to an engineering problem. I am interested to hear your feed back.
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