New Automotive Aluminium Harness Systems

The Aluminium wires, already being used for decades in the power supply industry, are now also present inside new Automotive harness systems. The motivation for using aluminium wires is:

• Weight reduction means improved fuel economy with reduced emissions.
• Cost reduction because of less use of raw material.

For a new automotive harness system we have tested the possible use of aluminium wires for the substitution of conventional copper wires specially for signal cables and power cables (like battery cable, see [1]). Some new interconnection technologies for aluminium wires have been developed with respect to the special properties of aluminium strands.

In this paper an overview about the possibilities of using aluminium cables for the next carlines is given. Especially the aluminium conductor can be used in power wiring systems to reach an optimized weight reduction (like for battery cables in some today carlines). But even for signal transmission aluminium cables yield a significant cost reduction potential, since the number of signal wires is high.