Is there a way to force current to be shared equally between 2 pins?
I need to supply 10A (at either 24 or 48V DC) through a connector.
The simple way would be to use a 10A per pin rated connector. But those fitting my needs are both bigger than I would like, and quite expensive.
There are smaller and much cheaper connectors (that we already use elsewhere in our design) that are rated 5A per pin, but have enough pins to use 2 pins per direction (ie 2 for GND and 2 for Vcc=24V or 48V). NB : there are not enough pins for 3 pins per direction. So provided current is perfectly shared, I could use this connector to pass 2*5A=10A.
The problem is that current is not perfectly shared (a slight difference in contact resistance is enough to unbalance currents), or even worse, the user might connect to only one pin, and all the current will go through that single pin.
Is there a way (adding some components on the supply PCB) to either :
- force equal current sharing
- limit current to 5A on each channel, in such way that when one channel is "full", the other takes the rest of the share
The price difference between the 2 sets of connectors is >100$, so price is not much of a constraint.
NB : I already have e-fuses I use elsewhere to prevent global over-current on a connector, which I can easily add as well to this connector. But they go open in case of overcurrent, so they can't be used to do the current sharing (but are usable to prevent over-current if the current is equally shared).
