Hello …
I need to move about 50 amps (maybe less or more) from one place on a PCB to another, and I do not have enough copper in the board to do it.
I seem to remember that someone made Long buss bars that would mount on a board, through hole, or surface mount, and act as a conductor, and maybe add some capacitance.
I have a height constraint of 0.2 inches , and the length needed is about 6 inches.
So a long skinny ( 3/8 inch ish wide) thing, with ground leads on one side, and 12V leads on the other, is what I have in mind.
Do you have any suggestions?
Thank you!! JD
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Even if you were to add a bus-bar to the PCB that can handle 50A it would not help due to one problem: there still isn’t enough copper to handle 50A to make a wide enough trace on the PCB according to your statement. The PCB would still start overheating because 50A stays 50A. The bus-bar would survive but the PCB would still fail unless you plan on soldering whatever component you need to route 50A to right on the bus and absolutely no traces would be connected to the bar that don’t have resistors and other protective measures…
Is soldering directly to the bar the intended idea? Also, from looking at our catalog, we only have the bus-bars that have separate circuits, not one long continuous strip unfortunately.
Kaleb’s point regarding termination-related issues is quite valid; those interconnect points would require some careful attention.
A person might conceivably get by however if those regions were made sufficiently small and provided with sufficient means of getting rid of any heat generated by I2R losses. A bus bar itself might potentially be used as a heat sink to that effect. Unfortunately I’m not aware of/finding anything either along these lines in terms of a standard product with the dimensions described. It wouldn’t seem difficult to grab oneself a roll of wire and a bending jig to make one’s own however if production volumes are expected to be low. If larger quantities are needed, there are suppliers such as Keystone Electronics on our line card that have experience in metal forming and offer custom fabrication services, subject of course to tooling charges, min order quantities, NCNR terms, etc.
Hello JAD700,
Below is a list of “Shunts, Jumpers” (busbars) that we do carry for your reference, it looks like 20A is the highest, and much shorter length:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/shunts-jumpers/304?s=N4IgjCBcoGw1oDGUBmBDANgZwKYBoQB7KAbXABYAmABnIE4QBdAgBwBcoQBlNgJwEsAdgHMQAXwlA
However, we do have some bare wire that can be formed to act as a bus bar. There are a few inconsistencies currently with our website filtering. If you are searching bare wire, you can select “Jacket Color” to be “None (Non-Insulated)” such like below link:
(Non-Insulated) Single Conductor Cables (Hook-Up Wire) - Filtering by “Jacket Color”
-Or you can select “Jacket (Insulation) Material” to be “No Jacketing - Bare Wire” per below link. Currently, both yield different results.
Single Conductor Cables (Hook-Up Wire) - Filtering by “Jacket Material”
We do have some of the actual busbars like 0280300000
They are listed under terminal block accessories.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/terminal-blocks-accessories/309
The other option could be using a barrier block with a jumper if that would work better.
I know this is an old post but I disagree with this response. I’ve also been looking for PCB mount bus bars. Specifically surface mount ones that are just a plain square/ rectangle piece of tinned copper that’s packaged in a tape and reel.
The reason I disagree with this is because this ultimately depends on what the application is. If you’re moving 50A to a single part on a PCB then yeah it’s probably not going to work.
Here’s a couple practical applications where this would be useful:
1.) If you were to use this as a jumper across the entire board and the only part of the circuit that connected to the bus bar was for example your voltage sensing circuitry. You might ask “why not just use an actual wire and separate wires for sensing?” The answer could simply be for ease manufacturing reasons, or to make the design more compact.
2.) This is where I’ve specifically needed a PCB mount bus bar and it’s for running power to multiple mosfets in parallel. Yes 50A is a lot to run directly on a PCB, but when you have a thick bus bar that distributes to 6 devices in parallel spaced out across a board, you’re only looking at 8.33A on the PCB copper for the devices.
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