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Date: 07/04/01 at 4:04 PM
Posted by: Andrew Gibson
E-mail: qafqgibsonq@hotmail.com

In Reply to: Trace width and current pulses posted by Charles Dumont on 06/29/01 at 10:42 AM:

There are 2 concerns (at least) that must be dealt with separately:

- Resistive Voltage drop must be calculated using the peak current. This may or may not limit how narrow / thin your lines can be, depending on how much sag you can tolerate.

- Conductor heating: for short current bursts you may be able to get away with calculating the RMS current & using that in the conductor size calculations. There are clearly limits to how far you can push this e.g. a 0.01% duty cycle calculation could lead one to use way too little Copper but you should be able to shrink it a bit.

To figure out the limit more accurately (& push the envelope more) one would need to have an estimate of the thermal time constant of the conductor. This would be an interesting exercise IF there was nothing else to do…

Best of Luck.

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