I am working on a circuit that requires me to be able to reverse and the direction and control the magnitude of current so I thought that using a motor driver would be the simplest solution that wouldn't require me to build multiple h-bridge circuits myself. I am using the TI quadruple half-H driver:
http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/sn754410.pdf
I am currently having some heating issues with it. Each of those chips should have a maximum of 0.6A continuous current going through them with a short spike of 0.8A when I turn it on and I use a 24V power supply as the power source. I use a teensy 3.5 with 488Hz PWM to control the enable pin and thus the current. According to my calculations the chip should be able to dissipate that amount of heat but what I found is that they get really hot. I have solved it by attaching heatsinks on top and having a fan blow on them which keeps them relatively cool. I would like to know why this is the case. I probably didn't calculate the power dissipated correctly so I'd also like to know how you would calculate that for this chip.

 

I am currently having some heating issues with it.

Have you got the pins grounded, for cooling purposes, as specified in the datasheet?

 

Yeah, all 4 pins are connected to a ground plane in the PCB that I am using. I did not solder them directly tho, I decided to use these sockets:
https://www.amazon.com/Uxcell-a11090300ux0244-2-54mm-Socket-Adaptors/dp/B0079SM1LW
so that I can easily remove them or substitute them in case they break. Do you think that the connection between the IC and the socket is not good enough to allow for heat transfer?

 

A socket like that will be a poor heat conductor.