Calculating current capacities of pcb traces

electromanj

Hello, I am wondering how do you calculate current capacities of circuit board traces. The largest load of my board is a relay coil drawing 60 MA nominal. All my traces are currently set to 0.01".· I'm not sure of the copper thickness. I'm using one of those radio shack kits with a 3" x 4.5" board. Is there a chart somewhere online? Thanks to all who respond!

bennettdan

Look up Trace caculators in google and their are a few tutorials on the mater..

metron9

http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/lab/9643/TraceWidth.htm

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Martin Hebel

This is from the help files for ExpressPCB.
Traces that carry significant current should be wider than signal traces. The table below gives rough guidelines of how wide to make a trace for a given amount of current.

0.010" 0.3 Amps
0.015" 0.4 Amps
0.020" 0.7 Amps
0.025" 1.0 Amps
0.050" 2.0 Amps
0.100" 4.0 Amps
0.150" 6.0 Amps

-Martin

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Martin Hebel
StampPlot - Graphical Data Acquisition and Control
AppBee -·2.4GHz Wireless Adapters & transceivers·for the BASIC Stamp & Other controllers·

electromanj

Thank you all for that information. This forum is awesome. Remember the hours and hours spent at the library searching through books? What a great world this Stamp thing is!!!!!!!!!