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- Newsgroups: rec.models.rc
- Path: sparky!uunet!usc!cs.utexas.edu!torn!nott!bnrgate!bcars267!NewsWatcher!user
- From: wwebster@bnr.ca (Bill Webster)
- Subject: Re: Q: Speed Controls (again!) attn: Jeroen, Chris, Paul, et al.
- Message-ID: <wwebster-151292080339@47.220.4.57>
- Followup-To: rec.models.rc
- Sender: news@bnr.ca (usenet)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: 47.220.4.57
- Organization: Bell Northern Research
- References: <1g30muINNgmu@gap.caltech.edu> <Byz1Ex.F8B@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz> <wwebster-091292082221@47.220.4.63> <1992Dec10.095043.23488@dxcern.cern.ch>
- Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 14:07:56 GMT
- Lines: 53
-
- In article <1992Dec10.095043.23488@dxcern.cern.ch>, jeroen@dxcern.cern.ch
- (Jeroen Belleman) wrote:
- >
- > Braving the risk of becoming a bit dogmatic about this,
- > I'll have a go at wiping out a few mis-understandings.
-
- (stuff deleted)
-
- > That leads me to a remark made by Bill Webster: The ON-resistance of
- > some power MOSFETs is in the region of 10 milli-Ohms. That's about
- > the resistance of a metre of 2.5mm-sqr copper wire. No lies. I
- > measured it and found it true.
-
- That may be true for a solid piece of wire. You should
- get the new data books from Harris, International Rectifier and
- Siliconix. They do manufacture FETs with ON-resistance down to
- 7 milli-Ohms and they have thick leads. These results are only
- found under certain test conditions which the ESC manufacturers
- take full advantage of in their bogus advertising.
-
- And no, I don't beleive
- the spec's any of the ESC manufacturers claim. They look at the
- FET manufacturer spec's and extrapolate. Then they take the
- extrapolated resistance and divide it by the number of throttle FETs
- used in the ESC.
-
- >
- > Also, you should not confuse motor EMF with the voltage across a
- > sense resistor which some manufacturers put in series with it in
- > order to measure the motor current. In the case you described, the
- > sense resistor was merely a (largish) PC board trace. Once again,
- > the motor EMF is proportional to its speed. Since motor current is
- > proportional to torque, current limiting is equivalent to torque
- > limiting. This is done most efficiently by having a feedback loop
- > fiddle with the duty-cycle of the speed controller so as to keep the
- > current within bounds. This explains the need for the sense resistor.
- >
-
- Sorry if I wasn't clear about how the voltage was sensed, but I
- can't think of another way to say "a parallel trace". I'm not
- implying there is any sense resistor. The parallel trace is acting
- as an inductive pick-up. Think of the thick source trace as the
- primary side of a transformer and the thin trace as the secondary.
- Once the secondary voltage is sensed by the op-amp it's feeding,
- the PWM is modified by the PWM coming out of the op-amp. Or at
- least that is what has been observed on the Tekin, Novak and Corally
- ESCs.
-
- So there is no sense resistor in the circuit I described.
-
-
-
- Bill Webster (WWEBSTER@BNR.CA)
-