24v13 driver failure

Support Motor controllers/drivers and motors
1

I bought two of these modules to use with a set of 24V DC gear motors from an electric wheel chair. Both were firmly mounted to a board & had 680uF caps installed. However very quickly after operating both motors one of the drives has failed.

This was during a sharp motor reverse, so i would have expected a current and voltage spike however I would have expected that to be well within the capabilities of the drive as the motors were just operating in free air with no load except the wheels inertia. The other drive has continued to operate fine, even performing the same harsh direction changes, the motor the failed drive connected to is not stalled and works fine when I apply 24V from the SLA batteries across it. I can hear a small hum from the drive when I try to drive it but there is no output to the motor.

Do you have any suggestions on what could have caused the drive to fail, is there possibly something else I am missing here that would allow one drive to operate fine but an identical one to fail? Ordinarily I would expect it just to be damaged by a current spike but I would have expected both drives to fail.

2

Hello.

I am sorry to hear about your motor driver. Motors from an electric wheel chair can be powerful, so it is not surprising that sharp changes in direction would damage the drivers, especially if the motors were going from full speed forward to full speed reverse or vice versa. Switching directions like that can draw up to twice the stall current of the motors. If you link to a product page or datasheet for your motors, I can look into whether or not that is likely what happened.

As for why only one motor driver was damaged and the other was not, it is possible you got a particularly bad spike or that you are operating the drivers near a threshold, but in general, using something out of spec is not guaranteed to break it, it is just not guaranteed to keep working either.

-Rocky