Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and beginning April 20th, 2021 (Eastern Time) the Yahoo Answers website will be in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
Trending News
Is there any chance that a 30-watt device's circuit board could arc across a 1mm gap to aluminum? Specifically 12v by about 2.5 amps.?
The aluminum would be a flat plate no closer than 1mm over the whole surface of the circuit board.
1 Answer
- qrkLv 76 months agoFavorite Answer
Depends.
Normal operation, 1mm gap is good for 150 to 170 VDC and VACpeak according to IPC-2221. At 12V, this is safe.
If you vaporise the copper traces due to a current overload condition, the plasma can support a fairly low voltage arc. DC arcs can be hard to extinguish, AC arcs often extinguish themselves. It takes quite a bit of current to vaporise a copper trace.
I've seen this happen on a 150VDC power source. It coated copper all over the cabinet and circuitry and caused arcs in areas that were 50+mm away from the original failure. The initial failure probably dumped on the order of 100k to 1000k Amps.
