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Welding principle

A project log for Pulse Tab Welder

An Open-Source, customizable battery tab welder powered by Arduino

frdric-druppelFrédéric Druppel 07/16/2017 at 21:460 Comments

The welding principle on a short, high current discharge to weld a zinc strip on a battery cell terminal. It has to be short enough in order not to overheat the cell, but "hot" enough to make a soldered point. The pulse length will be controlled with an Arduino, more on that in an other log.

I choose to use supercapacitors (in my case, Maxwell Ultracapacitors), primarily because I had them laying around for a while, and also because they can provide really high discharge currents.

As stated just above, welding requires high currents, and in order to pulse current up to 250A (in this welder anyway), you need a fast switching system that can support high currents. I opted for a MOS-FET, more precisely an IRFS3004-7PPbF. They can support currents up to 400 Amps (silicon limited) !! I found them relatively cheaply on Arrow.com.

That's it for now ^^

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