ANALYTICAL AND NUMERICAL COMPUTATION OF ELECTRICAL RESISTANCE IN A LOW CURRENT MULTI-SPOTS METALLIC CONTACT

Abstract

The problem concerning the specific resistance of electrical contacts is still of special importance especially in high complexity electrical systems or critical operation devices such as those used in the automotive industry. A huge number of studies have been conducted over time in order to develop easy models that allow the calculation of the contact resistance at the interface between two conductors taking into account the discontinuity of the contact surface. This paper presents a study on the computation of the contact resistance of two metal conductors with analytical relations and, respectively, using numerical computation models. The aim of this paper is to examine the differences between the results obtained using analytical models and numerical model based on finite element method (FEM) in COMSOL Multiphysics.