What Happens to a Fluid Coupler When it Gets Too Warm?

in the last video I demonstrated my flute coupler that I made and a quick test to see how much torque it made and since that you guys have left a lot of comments actually suggesting better methods that I should use that's why today in this video what I wanted to do was mostly focus on conducting a bunch of experiments based on the comments you guys had left also I got over that cold that I had in the last video so I don't sound like I am literally dying which is always a lot nicer audio sync now the first thing that I actually really did want to discuss was my testing method in the first video the thing you'll notice is that at points the lever isn't 100 horizontal and this is actually giving us really inaccurate results because gravity obviously only acts up and down down actually so this means that if the lever isn't 90 degrees from the vertical what's actually happening is that we're not getting the entire force due to gravity so we're actually getting kind of inaccurate results so a commenter actually suggested that instead of using a water bottle I should actually use a ordinary kitchen scale now the idea to use a scale as the force sensor to actually measure how much force is being put out by the flute coupler also I think I'm going to take my jacket off so you don't have to listen to this in the whole video it's getting really annoying so this led me to buy one of these cheap little pocketable scales having little scales like these are actually super useful as you can use them to find data for other projects as well now you're probably wondering why does this exist I mean who needs a scale that fits in their pocket I don't know either but I'm fairly certain that if Pablo Escobar was still around he'd probably carry one too now what I wanted to do to test the scale's accuracy was actually going to conduct a quick little experiment when I measure the steel ball it's 12.7 millimeters in diameter and we know that the density of Steel is 7.85 grams per cubic centimeter what we can do is actually calculate the theoretical mass of the steel ball this calculation comes out to be about 8.42 grams rounded to three significant figures so when I place the ball on the scale here we should be getting the same number and everything seems to be all well and good it's a fairly accurate scale so you know you aren't losing very much money when using a scale like this so now all we need is just a way to measure the torque and that's why I came up with this now this piece is almost exactly the same as the other one from the video with the water bottle except the biggest difference is that instead of having a hook Loop it actually has this arm that protrudes from the side now the height of this can actually be adjusted by moving the arm up and down the intention of this design is that so it can always be set horizontally because if there's too much of a height difference you can actually take some away and set it down or if it's too small you can make it bigger and just like the last one it slips over the existing part of the coupler so this is what we're going to use to conduct the test with along with a screw to clamp it down there's cure to JB Weld on the inside of the hole and this is going to increase the friction and once I've put it on you can get an idea as to how this is going to work you can see that when I turn the other side slowly it actually does read a little bit of force on the scale now theoretically to actually extract a valuable number in force and thus in torque we need to actually multiply the grams by 9.8 this is because force is equal to mass times acceleration Mass being the grams and acceleration being 9.8 the acceleration of gravity and then all we have to do after is multiply it by the length of the arm which is the same as the other one it's about 10 centimeters I keep forgetting to fix my hair in between shots so it gets progressively worse as the video goes on just before I move on to doing any tests there was actually a few comments that were concerned about it leaking oil now when I filled it up the first time uh I did actually spill a bunch of oil onto this because it ran off of the coupler so it was really hard to tell if it was leaking because there was also already oil on the Block to begin with so what I'm going to do is fill it up and then I'm going to mask it in the beginning and then at the end of the video what I'm going to do is take the mask again and then we're going to see if there's any kind of big difference between it to see how much I actually leaked out I'm filling the coupler until it's overflowing that way we know for sure that it's full now it's important to wipe off any excess so that we get an accurate measurement of how much oil is actually inside of the coupler all right so now that I've refilled it let's see how much it is so now this is the weight of when it's completely full okay so now that we're ready to conduct the test the first test I want to do is actually see how the torque changes as the speed increases now of course theoretically this torque should increase gradually as the speed increases realistically speaking it should be kind of a graph that levels off at a point I don't really have much test equipment to test for this so what we're going to do is just kind of look at it and make observations that way now we have to adjust this leveler until this beam is horizontal I realize now I haven't done a very good job explaining why it needs to be perfectly horizontal so let me explain that now you can see from this simple drawing that when the arm is perfectly horizontal as it pushes down on the scale it registers all of the force exerted from the arm because the scale can only read force that is up or down now in the second drawing you can see that when it's on an angle the force is actually invested on an angle but because it can only read the force that's up and down it's actually reading a smaller amount than what it's really making so this is why it's so important that it's perfectly horizontal there so now as you can see it's pretty much perfectly horizontal so this is going to give us the most accurate results foreign so it seems like it maxes out at its top speed now you can see very clearly that the torque output is directly related to the speed although we don't actually know what the maximum value is because the scale maxes out at only 500 grams now my first idea was to actually just remake another arm but make it longer this way the force output on this side would be lower but I had a better idea if I place the water bottle from the last test with some water removed on it you'll see that it weighs about 379 grams but if I zero it then I take it off now you'll notice that it's reading negative 379 grams now the interesting part here is that if I push with the same amount of force to bring it to zero I can actually keep going and bring it up to positive 500 again this means that the window or the amount that we can actually measure is a lot greater than 500 if we start in the negatives and kind of move our way up to positive 500 with the arm just resting on it it comes out to be negative 360 which is a convenient number it's really easy to remember foreign and it came out to be about 300 or so so quickly if we do 360 minus 300 we get a difference of 660 grams now if we multiply that by 9.8 divide by 1000. now that's how many newtons of force are being exerted on the plate now if I multiply this number again by 0.1 and that is the amount of torque in newton meters from the fluid coupler at the drills Max Capacity the first experiment was a huge success the scale allows us to see the torque progression increase as does the speed increase and we were also able to find out just how much torque we were getting to the other side so now I think we should move on to this second experiment a really big downside to fluid couplers however is that they actually tend to generate a lot of heat especially under load when there's a big difference between the speed of the input shaft and the output shaft there's a lot of fluid friction going on inside and this generates a lot of heat this is actually a very big reason why a lot of automatic transmissions die the fluid is going to get really hot and when it gets really hot it kind of stops acting like an oil and this is when the parts actually start to get damaged so the purpose of the second experiment is to actually see how much warmer the fluid coupler is going to get if I lock one end up and then I spin the other end for about a minute straight so its initial temperature is reading 8.3 degrees it's starting to gel up just a little bit because it's not making the same sloshing sounds it was earlier so now the new temperature after the test is now reading 22.9 wow now we know that it started at 8.3 and it ended at 22.9 this is a difference of 14.6 degrees just in that one minute test but I actually saw something really interesting going on during the test as well during the test I actually noticed some of the fluid was starting to leak between the cracks what I'm going to do is I'm going to wipe all of it off to make a clear surface and I'm going to repeat the test and then we're actually going to see if it starts to seep through the rest of the housing I sped this clip up here and if you actually pay close attention you can actually see that the oil is actually seeping out a little bit now as the oil was warming up more and more it began seeping out from Little Cracks around the outside of the housing it probably was a printer error that caused this but it was really interesting to see where the oil was actually coming from you can actually see from the testing how much oil has Spilled Out from the coupler onto the bottom and the rest of it is just seeping out of the housing it's not even spinning the other end now it has almost no fluid coupling ability whatsoever now one user left a really interesting comment that I wanted to bring up they were suggesting that I should be looking at the dynamic torque of the fluid coupler I assume what they're meaning by Dynamic torque is the torque changing over time as in as the coupler starts warming up uh how is the torque going to get affected now since we already know how much torque it makes when it's at 8.3 degrees how about we find out how much it's going to make when it's at the current temperature so right now the fluid is at 28 degrees okay and let's try now this is what it was at just before the drill coupler actually broke but as you can see it's only negative 288 grams all the stress testing seems to have gotten to it it's actually melted a little bit as you can see now this test was really interesting because it was only reading negative 288 grams and it started at negative 360 grams that's only a difference of 72 grams in fact when I put the numbers up on screen you can see that it's only making 11 of the amount of torque it was making at 8.3 degrees and that's really interesting although that is more of a study on the fluid itself and not the design of the fluid coupler now instead if I use something like this transmission fluid we might have actually gotten a very different result because it is only vegetable oil after all but just before I go and tear it down and have a look let's throw it on the scale and see how much it weighs now after all of that oil had leaked out of it after all of the tests that is the final Mass when I first took the measurement it was reading 304.94 grams now it's reading 304.19 grams a difference of 0.75 grams now the amount of fluid that actually leaked out is pretty negligible it wasn't even a whole gram but the other part too is that fluid actually expands when it gets warmer so it could be the case that it looked like a lot more leaked out but if you actually took the mass of it it's probably not that much especially at the temperature that it was poured in now when I went ahead to drain the fluid none was coming out so it looks like I'm just gonna have to get the fluid out another way oh that's a lot of material now after I went ahead and I cleaned up all the parts to this they look basically the exact same as they did when they went into the coupler this seal worked amazingly uh none of the oil that was observed to have leaked out actually left through the seal it all actually just left through the uh the impeller which was what we saw this was a pretty cool experiment we got to see not only the maximum amount of torque the torque changing as the speed changes and we got to see what happens when the fluid coupler starts to warm up under all that load now I had ideas in the future with actually mating one of these flu couplers with something like a weed eater motor but now that we know that it has some kind of oil seepage issues it's probably best that I first work out what's going on with the layers it could just be a printer calibration thing to be honest it's also interesting to observe what happens to the fluid when it gets too warm so that might be a case where I'll have to do a test with something like real transmission fluid to see how it damages the plastic if it does damage it at all but I think what I'm going to do now is just leave it on the Shelf with the rest of my projects I might get back to it in the future but until then thanks for watching [Music] foreign

Channel: Camden Bowen

Views: 57,077

Keywords: Camden Bowen, Engine, 3d printing, fluid coupler, torque converter, how does a torque converter work, how does, what does, homemade, diy

Id: e1eHqHXOCnA

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023