Hardened Switch mod?

[cherwilco]

WS-8-150-DC

have a lot of fan failures I decided to kill my warranty on this one for a test.

https://imgur.com/a/5laqBk5

I basically upgraded the heatsink inside to 33x33mm and added at heatsink to the power chips at the back with a thick thermal pad to make up for the varying chip heights.
(btw these chips seem to really benefit from some thermal assistance like this)
then I tossed out the fan.
then I coated all but the heatsinks with some silicon conformal coating to add a bit of moisture protection.

gonna stick this in a hot enclosure and beat the hell out of it... will report back later

[Julian]

You need to reject about 10W from the SoC at what i consider nominal traffic load, and you *need* to reject a factor of power load (Dave, please correct me) which i believe is the 100's complement of the efficiency, so if 87% efficient @ 70W you would *need* to reject that 13% or 9.1W; however as you said, everything helps efficiency so overcooling is best only until wintertime, ymmv based on ambient temps.
Fourier's law of heat conduction if you need search terms for the math.
If there's interest I can do an engineered passive cooling kit for the DCs in-house; I did the ones on this thing's batteries, chargers, and motor FETs: https://investor.avinc.com/news-release ... first-test
you should see the temperature swings at 60,000 ft if you think a hot enclosure is bad
definitely a neat project, keep us posted

[physcon]

We've also had a lot of fan failures the last few years. We're located in a hot desert environment so our climate is harder on them than most, but I do think the older Sunon fans were more reliable than the generic fans Netonix is using now. We bought some replacement fans directly from Netonix but many of those were not lasting more than a year or two which was very frustrating.

I got sick of the failures and bought a pack of Sanyo 109P0424H3013 from digikey back in 2023: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/det ... 13/6191842

We've had zero failures with these new fans so far. The only annoying part is these fans don't come with connectors so you'll need to crimp those on yourself.

[Dave]

thanks for info