I have tried looking around for any ampacity values for welds and did not come up with much. 10A is one that i saw mentioned on another forum. I know this can vary depending on the diameter of the weld but does anyone have a rule of thumb they follow? Trying to decide if I should go with 4, 6 or 8 welds on my new pack.
Ampacity of each spot weld
- Thread starter thendless
- Start date
The bottleneck is usually the strips not the welds.
What are you planning to use for the strips?
On the packs I’ve built I generally used 6 welds since that fits in the available space.
What are you planning to use for the strips?
On the packs I’ve built I generally used 6 welds since that fits in the available space.
YoshiMoshi
10 W
The answer is nobody knows. I've done lots of research into this topic. If your referring to copper STRIP ampacity from the various tables online based on WIRE ampacity, than this should not be done. Always verify with temp gun.
Given dimensions of your strip, ambient temp, insulation, what cells your using, the welds and how many... There is no generic mathematical formula.
Tables online do not specify length of the strip which does play a role in ampacity. Nor do the tables online for copper wire specify ambient temperature or what insulation was used, or temperature of the strip...
Essentially we as humans have been making battery packs for a very long time, but still do not fully understand the physics enough to come up with a generic mathematical formula.
Something to invent and discover.
The closest thing we have is NEC 310, there's a table for bare copper wire in there in open air conditions (NOT in a battery pack) with ambient temp specified. However this is for WIRE and not STRIPS and should not be interchanged. So table is pretty much useless for building battery packs using copper strips.
