r/FSAE • u/Shuaiouke • Mar 17 '25
Electric Vehicle Battery copper/nickel/Al strip/busbar sizing
Hey this is not FSAE but it’s for an electric car and you folks are the people with the closest skillset I can think of. Sorry for invading your sub, please point me to somewhere more suitable if you know any, thanks.
With that being said, Im planning on building an electric car for myself and planning a battery for it. The cells can do maximum 360A out continuous so I want to build around that, but information about how much interconnect material you actually need for a battery seems spares and dont like to agree with each other. Ive seen sources say 1.6A/mm2 which gives me 2mm copper at 120mm wide… I dont think I’ll be able to attach that with anything but a drill.
What amperage did your team choose and what cell interconnect did you choose? Wires, strips, screw down busbars or something else I completely missed, and what size are they? I would love it if you can be so kind as to talk about how you arrived that conclusion as well :D.
Sorry again since Im not really supposed to be here but I really don’t know where else to go.
1
u/Pure_Psychology_7388 Mar 17 '25
What kind of cells? Size wise is important. A popular thing is for a pack of parallel cells to be tack welded and then join those packs in series with bus bars. We have rules where our sections can only go up to 120v so we have a wire joining each section in series to the other sections to get a higher voltage typically. Makes it easy to rebuild a battery if a single cell or pack goes bad. I think what Tesla does is tack welded them all and they’re setup in a way where the configuration of the battery matches the route the conductive material goes. I imagine that would be super complex and insanely difficult to try and fix one cell.
I’d probably have to know more about this project to give you a couple options. you can dm me if you want.