Agilent Technologies N6700 manual Wire Size, Awg

2 Installation

Wire Size

		FIRE HAZARD Select a wire size large enough to carry short-circuit current
	WARNING
		without overheating. To satisfy safety requirements, load wires must be
		heavy enough not to overheat while carrying the short-circuit output current
		of the unit (refer to the following table).
		Along with conductor temperature, you must also consider voltage
		drop when selecting wire sizes. The following table lists the
		resistance for various wire sizes and the maximum lengths to limit
		the voltage drop to 1.0 V per lead for various currents.
		Note that the minimum wire size required to prevent overheating
		may not be large enough to prevent over-voltage tripping or maintain
		good regulation. Under most conditions, the load wires should also be
		heavy enough to limit the voltage drop to no more than l.0 V per lead.
		To help prevent nuisance tripping of the over-voltage circuit, select a
		wire size sufficient to handle the FULL output current of the unit no
		matter what the intended load current or current limit setting
		Load lead resistance is also an important factor relating to the CV
		stability of the instrument when remote sensing capacitive loads. If
		high capacitance loads are expected, you should not use wire gauges
		heavier than 12 to 14 AWG for long runs of load lead.
Wire size	Current-carrying capacity in Amps		Resistance	Max. Length to Limit Voltage to 1 V/Lead
	for stranded copper wire			for 5 A	for 10 A	for 20A	for 50 A
AWG	2 wires bundled	4 wires bundled	Ω/foot	Wire length in feet
20	7.8	6.9	0.0102	20	x	x	x
18	14.5	12.8	0.0064	30	15	x	x
16	18.2	16.1	0.0040	50	25	x	x
14	29.3	25.9	0.0025	80	40	20	x
12	37.6	33.2	0.0016	125	63	30	x
10	51.7	45.7	0.0010	200	100	50	20
8	70.5	62.3	0.0006	320	160	80	32
6	94	83	0.0004	504	252	126	50
Area in mm2	2 wires bundled	4 wires bundled	Ω/meter	Wire length in meters
0.5	7.8	6.9	0.0401	5	x	x	x
0.75	9.4	8.3	0.0267	7.4	x	x	x
1	12.7	11.2	0.0200	10	5	x	x
1.5	15.0	13.3	0.0137	14.6	7.2	x	x
2.5	23.5	20.8	0.0082	24.4	12.2	6.1	x
4	30.1	26.6	0.0051	39.2	19.6	9.8	3.9
6	37.6	33.2	0.0034	58	29	14.7	5.9
10	59.2	52.3	0.0020	102	51	25	10.3

Notes: 1. Capacity for AWG wires derived from MIL-W-5088B. Max. ambient temp: 55°C. Max. wire temp: 105°C.

2.Capacity for metric wires are derived from IE Publication 335-1.

3.Capacity of aluminum wire is approximately 84% of that listed for copper wire.

4.“x” indicates wire is not rated for the maximum output current of the power module.

5.Because of wire inductance considerations, it is also recommended that you keep your load leads twisted, tie wrapped, or bundled together and less than 50 feet (14.7 meters) in length per lead.

26 Series N6700 User’s Guide