The Engineer’s Guide to Choosing Gearmotors for Dirty and Wet Environments

This whitepaper is a guide for selecting gearmotors suitable for dirty and wet environments, emphasizing the importance of ingress protection.

Selecting the right gearmotor for an application often involves more than just knowing the volts, speed and torque that are needed. In some applications, it is just as critical to understand the environment the gearmotor must survive in and to choose a product constructed for use in that environment. Some environments can
be especially harsh on gearmotors. This whitepaper explores one category of harsh environments, which is dirty and wet environments that require superior ingress protection on a gearmotor. It explores how to choose gearmotors for dirty and wet environments by examining the standardized Ingress Protection (IP) ratings, explaining what design tradeoffs are involved in achieving ingress protection, showing how the motor design is validated for a specific IP rating, examining mistakes engineers sometimes make in selecting a gearmotor, and presenting real-world examples of gearmotors used in dirty and wet environments