Abstract—In the electric power industry, optimizing power flow is a primary concern, in the generation, transmission and distribution process. One key ingredient is providing and maintaining low resistance conductive joints. Field experience and laboratory studies have shown that this is especially true in the case of bus bars and bolted high current connections. Unplated joints are generally less reliable due to potential oxidation of the surfaces. If unplated joints are used special care must be taken to clean the two surfaces and petroleum based greases should be applied to slow down the oxidation process. The development of Belleville washers permitted some significant advances in the ways busbars could be joined. This paper describes how plated bus bars outperform unplated bus bars by providing stable contact resistance and a low maximum operating temperature that will increase the service life of the bus joint.

Index Terms—Aluminum bus bar, belleville washer, copper bus bar, contact resistance, , silver plating

Samarjit Bhattacharyya, Anandita Chowdhury, and Hitesh R. Jariwala are with Department of Electrical Engineering of S. V. National Institute of Technology, Surat.india.
M Sharaschandra Shetty and Rajulkumar Engineer are with Reliance Industries Limited, Hazira, Surat, Gujarat, India.

Cite: Samarjit Bhattacharyya, Anandita Chowdhury, Hitesh R. Jariwala, M Sharaschandra Shetty, and Rajulkumar Engineer, "Maintaining Low Resistance in Conductive Joints," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 3, no. 6, pp. 802-806, 2011.