Hi There,
Posting here after Months of unsuccessful research and I hope there gonna be some smart guys with good idea.
In a equipment I'm building, I need to carry large current to many PCBs. To do so, I've planned to use busbar. Those busbar have a length of 1.3 meter and are 7x8mm to which the PCB are screwed with M4 screws and the current goes trough it.
Now there are two issues, one is the electrical contact, because of the oxidation of the material which is an issue for the electrical contact and another is the strength of the material to avoid the bar to be bend during manufacturing.
We are trying to use Aluminium for this, but raw aluminium cannot be directly connected due to the oxide layer.
We have looked a lot to do surface treatment such as plating or coating but it seems impossible to find anybody that can do that on bars that are 1.3 meter long and I cannot split them unfortunately.
The solution we are looking at currently is to use inserts. As the insert a pressed fit or screwed on the aluminium, it breaks the oxide layer and then stay in place. We know of some companies doing so using ARCAP inserts.
However, one of the issue, is that there isn't much space to allow much bigger hole size (M4 on 7mm wide bars), as the insert would need to be at least 2mm thick on M4 would mean a hole ~6mm, leaving only 0.5mm of material.
Then I found Helicoil inserts which have the advantage of not needing a much larger hole size and that would mechanically fit.
https://blog.baysupply.com/common-uses-for-helical-inserts-and-why-you-need-themHowever, there are very little information about using this for contacting on aluminium as an insert. The best information I found is
"This makes tangless inserts particularly vital to automotive and electrical applications".
Question being, is there anyone having experience with that, perhaps have recommendation or other ideas to contact those busbars, help would be very much appreciated.
[EDIT]
The equipment is for indoor and lab.
Thanks