Industrial Engineer · phase 8 of 16 · noun

Heat Sink / Cooling Fan

Thermal components that remove heat from the drive power electronics.

The Explain card

Plain English: The heat sink is the finned metal the power modules are bolted to, and the fan moves air across it. Together they carry away the heat the rectifier and inverter make.
Example: A 50 horsepower drive at full load throws off a couple of kilowatts of heat. The fan runs whenever the heat sink is warm, and the drive derates or trips if the sink gets too hot.
Why it matters: Fans are the most common mechanical failure in a drive, and a clogged heat sink in a dusty plant is a drive that trips on overtemperature every summer afternoon. Cabinet airflow and filter cleaning are drive maintenance, whatever the schedule calls them.
Hook: Every watt the motor does not get has to go somewhere.

How the word is built, where it came from, and what it sits beside in memory.

In a sentence

During VFD commissioning, verify that the heat sink fins are clean and the cabinet airflow is unobstructed before running the motor at full load.

Why these words

heat Old English hætu, warmth or high temperature identifies the thermal quantity associated with the phrase
sink Old English sincan, to descend or become submerged presents the second element as a receiver or destination

Where it came from

Origin: English compound formed from heat and sink
Entered the language: 1930s
What changed: Sink developed from an action of descending into names for basins and figurative receivers, then joined heat as a technical electronics term.

How it is spelled

Pattern: Heat uses the ea vowel team for the long e sound.
Pattern: Sink uses a short i in a closed syllable and ends with the common nk consonant pair.
Pattern: The compound is normally written as two separate words.

Spelled like

Broken into chunks

What it sits beside

Same subject

Same shape

drive cooling hardware

VFD power-stage parts

Phase 8: VFD Drive Hardware and Power Path

Inside the drive: rectifier, DC bus and inverter, the three stages every variable frequency drive uses to rebuild the waveform a motor sees.