Author Topic: Custom DC busbar - your thoughts please  (Read 3831 times)

ZuluAlpha

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Custom DC busbar - your thoughts please
« on: November 11, 2015, 05:29:12 AM »
Hi All,
The effort of working with stubborn thick DC cables (35 and 50mm^2) led met build a custom DC busbar (Pics attached). The pitch of the teeth are made for Hager breakers rated for DC. It also reduces the number of connection points where failure can occur. Before this, the DB was a mess with wires that didn't want to go where I needed them, now it's a clean neat install.

Your thoughts?

SeanB

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Re: Custom DC busbar - your thoughts please
« Reply #1 on: November 11, 2015, 11:13:00 AM »
Nice work, though I would seriously suggest making some plastic covers that enclose the entire copper bus aside from the breaker points, and which allows you to have an insulating spacer to keep the bars apart.  with DC busbars the problem is that once an arc starts it tends to burn until it melts the whole bar away into vapour.  A bar of white glass filled nylon ( Available from Maizy plastics nationwide) or SRBP, whatever is your choice, will be both machinable with regular tools ( though the glass filled nylon needs carbide milling cutters, and is murder on regular HSS drills and tooling) you can tap holes in it to have screws in from either side, staggered at least 4 hole diameters, and no more than half way through the material, so that you can use some stainless steel capscrews to hold the bars together in a block. You can also use them to hold a top and bottom cover in place made from thinner SRBP material, or bare FR4 PCB material.

SRBP is also known as Bakelite, a brown resin impregnated cloth which is used to make distribution panels. More stable at high temperature than the glass filled nylon, though it is more brittle.

If you are tapping threads into the soft copper I would recommend leaving a close clerarance hole instead and using a Belleville washer ( available in a few sizes, you do get them from Action bolt here in Durban, and BMG will probably have them, though the ones I needed a while ago were not so I ordered them from the UK at a horrid price and courier cost) to apply a constant contact pressure on the contact surface so it does not loosen with creep. As well some dielectric grease on the bolt threads and the shiny clean mating surfaces to keep them good contacts will help a lot.

ZuluAlpha

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Re: Custom DC busbar - your thoughts please
« Reply #2 on: November 11, 2015, 11:35:58 AM »
Thanks for the input Sean.

It is designed for plastic spacers to keep them firm and appart. Not shown on the pics yet.
The idea is to have a solid block beteween them. Minimum distance between any metal is about 15mm, so I doubt flash is an issue, and the batt cables do have a propper fuse in place... But still, DC!

I have found the polished copper (99% pure busbar grade) do tarnish quickly, so a coat of rubber or even some epoxy paint would help assuming one can keep the contact areas open.

Bellville washer and dielectric grease is good advice. Thanks!

SeanB

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Re: Custom DC busbar - your thoughts please
« Reply #3 on: November 11, 2015, 12:01:01 PM »
Not my idea, but one I have seen on a lot of DC and high current material. The coating the busbars is good, you might want to get a can of spray on rubberising or simply clean them and paint with a few coats of road marking paint, white, red, yellow and black is available, though you probably will find yellow and white the most common.  Sticks well, and you can dip and hang using a tip of the busbar as a handle and some PTFE pipe tape as a non stick cover for contact areas on the main bus.

Where in Za are you, I am in Sunny Durban.

kibi

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Re: Custom DC busbar - your thoughts please
« Reply #4 on: December 05, 2015, 11:50:44 AM »
I think that is a very neat solution, please keep us updated.
I am currently working on a new combiner box with string current sensing. It's till in the design phase now, but when I start building my new solar system, I'll start a thread.