Electronic – Motor Driver keeps dying/frying driving a worm gear motor

h-bridgeinduction motormosfetmotor

I am looking for some consultation about controlling a24VDC worm gear moto. I have blown 4 h bridge motor drivers thus far and while I have been trying to keep my project price tag low I may need to step up in quality but I want to make sure something else may be going wrong. I am a ME by trade but I remembered a smidgen about inductive loads and back EMF wreaking havoc on components. I have been using the following: driver 1 and driver 2 to control the motor but they keep failing and at random times. This makes me suspect not my wiring but something else and possibly not protecting the components. My most recent board was working, next thing you know the ERR LED light is on and the manual says "ERR LED Indicator – Error LED Indicator, it will illuminate when fault detected in on board MOSFET driver."

I would think a motor driver board would know it would be dealing with inductive loads and protect against this but maybe I am wrong. Do I need to spend more money on someting like the following?

Help a poor ME sticking his toe in the water of electronics!

Thanks in advance!

Best Answer

Question

The OP has so far fried four motor drivers. He wishes to know what went wrong, and how to avoid frying more motor drivers.

Answer

Part A - Analysis of the the OP's motor and motor drivers

We will first study his motor and motor drivers, and then guess what went wrong.

Uxcell JFC63R Gear Motor (Appendix A)

My first impression is that it is a very powerful motor. I usually first look at the motor shaft. The shaft is 10mm diameter, which is for very powerful motors. The power is 80W, an of course is very powerful. This implies big current is need to drive this motor, and that the back EMF, which is proportional to the square of the motor current, is huge, and needs a powerful and fast Schottky flyback diode to absorb the motor's inductive energy, when the motor current is switched off.

Another implication is that even with light load, the motor might not move, and the stall current would be many times of the operating current, and the motor driver might easily get fried, if there is no over current and over temperature protection.

Cryton 80W, 13A Motor Drive MD13S (Appendix B)

The Cryton MD13S looks OK, except it can only handle max 13A continuously. As mentioned earlier, this motor stall current may exceed 13A, this overheating the driver and fry it.

Niyito 170W, 110A Motor Driver (Appendix C)

The current rating looks OK. However, there is heat sink used, which might be problematic, if there is no temperature protection.

Part B - Suggestion to the OP and other motor newbies

The OP appears to have thrown himself at the deep end of the swimming pool. I would suggest to start learning at the shallow end, ie cheapy motor drivers and motors such as L298N H-bridge motor driver, and TT130 toy motor.

The good thing is that the basic principles of H-bridge drivers are almost identical, no matter current rating. In other words, almost all knowledge and skills can directly transfer when switching to industrial/professional grade stuff.

So, after gaining experience and confidence, he can then try high end motor drivers such as BTN7971B (45V, 50A), and not so powerful (therefore not so easily fried! :)) motors such as JGB37-520 (12V, 350mA), as described in this motor newbie tutorial.

References

(1) Uxcell DC24V 80W 100RPM 8NM 10mm Reversible Worm Gear Motor High Torque Speed Reducing Electric Gearbox Motor-JCF63R - Amazon

(2) Cytron 13A DC Motor Driver MD13S - Amazon

(3) Noyito 170W 2-Channel 3.3V/5V Logic input PWM H-bridge Motor Drive Module - Amazon

(4) Pololu G2 High-Power Motor Driver 24v13 - Pololu

(5) How to use motor drivers with H-bridge and PWM input, to control direction and speed of DC motors?

(6) What is back EMF? EESE, Asked 2021apr27, Viewed 714 times

(7) BTS7960/BTN7971B Motor Driver Q&A 1/2

(8) BTS7960/BTN7971B Motor Driver Q&A 2/2

(9) BTN7971B High Current PN Half Bridge (45V, 44A) Datasheet - Infineon 2008jun

(10) Infineon Transportation Brochure (24V to 60V, page 11, DC Motor Control) - Infineon

(11) DC Motor 80W Reviews - AlliExpress