First off, I wanted to tell you all that i got an email tonight from a fellow who reproduced my setup (eerily so). He has realized a 20C improvement over his previous setup. Gave me the "warm fuzzies". ;D
I thought I mentioned in my second part to the article that I eliminated the ferrite choke as it is not needed when you run the blower off of the 3-terminal regulator. The 3TR isolates the motor from the 12V buss adequately to not need any reverse EMI filtering.
I have had my motor down as low as 4.6V, but brush motors have a sweet zone and I consider below 5V to be out of that sweet zone. No telling whether the brushes do better the slower you run the motor. Somehow, I suspect you don't want it too slow, but that's a gut feeling (non-scientific). Obviously, the bearings love running slower.
Automobiles do use centrifugal blowers, but like axial fans, they come in many form factors and speeds (cfm). Somehow, I doubt your car has a 170cfm blower on it. That, having been said, the blower does an effective job at any speed and getting an equivalent one with less cfm is just fine. Especially if it runs quieter!
I will see if I can put together a how-to-assemble tutorial on the regulator. Believe me, if you have a hand drill and can do simple soldering, it's not really much of a challenge. Certainly much easier from the labor difficulty standpoint than installing Phase 1 and 2 voltage mods on my KT7A was.
I spent the evening doing some characterizing of the performance of my setup. I spec'd the cooling capacity of my heatsink, using the stock fan compared to the Cohesive Air approach. I focused mainly on the higher wattages (calculated using radiate.exe) as that is where many decent HSFs fall down. Here's a quick comparison:
Result "A" is using my MC-462A with the stock Delta fan, a Sanyo-Denki 92x32mm 55cfm fan on the case intake and the same on the exhaust. That S-D fan is IMHO, the best form factor/noise/performance fan available for case ventilation.
Result "B" uses the Dayton 2C646A blower at 10V, the duct (in part 2 of article) and no case fans. Keep in mind, at 10V the blower noise is very close to having a window air conditioner cooling the room.
Watts---------A--------------B
98.9------.185c/w------.147c/w
94.6------.184c/w------.142c/w
91.8------.180c/w------.142c/w
87.6------.177c/w------.138c/w
83.4------.171c/w------.133c/w
80.9------.168c/w------.131c/w
76.8------.165c/w------.125c/w
72.8------.160c/w------.120c/w
While both are excellent performers for air cooling, .12c/w beats a lot of the water cooling results(problems?) I've seen posted lately. Whew, I'm beat. CUL
Hoot
