Machine cooling question

I have a type of sewing machine that is used in several of my automated setups that is having cooling issues. This is a machine far from your typical as it is cam driven. I need some ideas as to how to increase its oil capacity, or provide better cooling, with the least amount of hassle. From the pics attached, please see the bottom two plates that are aluminum castings.

How can I adapt a sump type setup to provide a larger capacity of oil, or has anyone ever had experience with a CPU cooler like this one? I thought amount milling out a part of the machine and pressing ( screwing, or adhering ) in the cooling plate.

https://www.surpluscenter.com/item.asp?UID=2228011911514401&item=16-1361&catname=

Are there any type of car ATF coolers that might work? The machines have 220V 3P going to them as well as compressed air with monstrous amounts of volume to spare.

The maker of the machine has been consulted and they used to cast bottom plates with a bigger bubble, but they cant do it anymore since they off shored everything. ( another sad story ). The Al heatsink shown is made from the scrap bin. It did not help.

Thanks

Jason

pics are posted here.

I'd go with a hydraulic cooling unit, a separate pump and spin on filter. Suck it out the drain plug, put it back in the fill plug. I'd suggest calling your local Parker Hannefin (sp) Rep and have him come out and take a look. They are the wizards of all things Oil handling and can probably make you something to that is pretty much "bolt on".

Other option would be to look for a higher performance lubricant, reduce heat a bit a generation stage just might slove the problem. Have you any idea how much cooling it needs? Power going into it, absorbed power that is. Or just it takes 5 mins to get hot a hour? or more like 10 hours? With out knowing how much heat your trying to get rid of here its hard to make any suggestions. A heat sink needs to dump the heat, at a minimum it needs a fan moving air across it.

Thanks Guys. Good question, after about 30 minutes of use, it is too hot to touch. As small as it looks, there is very little space in the machine and weight is 50LBS+ of cast iron. I have no way of measuring the heat so it is a hit or miss on this.

the MFG used to recommend turbine oil as an alt, mcmaster ( part number 3025K25 ) shows it as standard machine oil ISO 32. Is this the same? Used too means 50 years ago.

Thanks

Jason

We have a couple setups where we sew 6 layers of 6000# test nylon webbing, a uniques hot melt adhesive that secures it all together and a hunk of plastic tubing just to up the challenge. Naturally the needle get wickedly hot and would melt the thread without supplementary cooling. We use a larger needle and a vortex cooler style cold air gun. It works quite well.

Could you direct a cold air guns outlet to help remove excess heat? My guess is it would work better than adding to the oil supply unless you have a way to recirculate the oil.

Using oil to remove heat from the machine will probably be the easiest to implement, but it needs to be done carefully.
Tony suggested using a hydraulic setup, but you really need two pumps. A smaller pump to feed a constant supply of oil to the cambox and a larger pump for scavenging the oil out. Put the scavenge pump on a fitting positioned at the correct fill level. A cheap vane pump will do, that way the scavenge pump keeps sucking out oil and keeps the level at the correct fill point. Put a cheap heat exchanger like a auto heater core in the scavenge line.

You'd be quite surprised at the amount of cooling capacity of a fairly large aluminum oil tank too, get a 5 gallon aluminum tank for an oil sump. The extra capacity alone will make a difference. The flow rate doesn't need to be huge, just enough to take heat away.

You can calculate how much cooling capacity you need by the drive motor horsepower.

Another simpler idea is similar to what you suggest with a CPU cooler, although they don't have much cooling capacity in watts. Find one for multiple processors.
Run a coil of copper tube into the oil sump and circulate cool water through it. That way it will be more efficient than bolting a cold plate to the outside of the machine.

Your machine looks fairly small, it won't take much to cool it off.

Chris

you are probably running several of these, how about running recirculating water lines to each with a coil in the oil sump? one little chiller could take care of several machines.

Stuart Caruk said:

We use a larger needle and a vortex cooler style cold air gun. It works quite well.

Could you direct a cold air guns outlet to help remove excess heat? My guess is it would work better than adding to the oil supply unless you have a way to recirculate the oil.

Click to expand...

Vortex tubes use a tremendous amount of air - but if you have the air capacity to spare and just need something quick, they will probably do the job. They definitely would require the least amount of mounting labor and wouldn't require any machining on your machine head. They really are fairly inexpensive compared to putting together a whole oil cooling setup unless you salvaged a bunch of stuff.

Thanks group, I will try the lube change first to the turbine oil. I found some local. If that does not work. All electronics is down the street from me ( http://www.allelectronics.com/ ) and they have a large selection of heat sinks with fans.

Last resort is in the automated setup that I am putting together. I could put an oil level sensor in a sump and tie it into the plc to keep a gravity fed / recirc pump on the oil.

I will let you know what works best.

Thanks

Jason

Dont forget heat sink compond bettwen the part and the heat sink, with out it the heat sink will be orders of magnitude less usefull.

a few more thoughts.
[I used to be in the cut and sew business], if you added cooling lines, you probably would not need a chiller, just a water resevoir. How about adding a fan that runs off the belt? also, is the duty cycle continuous? if not can you turn the motor off? a 2/3 hp motor is a 500 watt heater.

The only drawback I can see to adding a heatsink to the housing is it doesn't address the problem of heat transfer from the oil very well. What you ideally want to do is take the heat out of the oil, which is doing the job of taking heat away from the friction generating points in the machine.

Your cast housing isn't going to transfer heat very well. If you cooled a small area of the housing the heat flow across a thick piece of cast iron is going to be low, and may not remove much heat. Cpu coolers are made to take heat away from a tiny but very hot area.

You could remake the bottom plate from aluminum and mount a heat sink or cpu cooler like the one in your link to it. The thinner the metal between your oil and the heat sink the better. Although if you are going to remake the bottom plate, add a sump and put some heat sinks on it.

It looks like the oil capacity of the housing is quite small, that doesn't help.

I agree with Surplusjohn about not needing a chiller, water takes a large amount of energy to heat it.

Could you make a new plate or block where the sight glass goes so that you could run a few coils of copper into a chamber that would be filled with oil? A 5 gallon reservoir and a little pump would probably do the trick, especially if the water tank is aluminum.

we can provide you aluminum heat sink for your machine cooling question. hope we can help you .