I am re-winding transformers, and I was wondering if braided copper wire can be used for the secondary winding. I will be using large gauge wire (4-8 ga.) and I just need to know if the performance will be terrible if I do use it.
Not ideally. You should be using solid lacquered or varnished wire.
I have seen it used before by the people running cnc servo/steppers. The duty cycles are really low i guess it works out for them. If you go for it rememebr to put a fuse inline. (dont make the fuse to large)
You probably shouldn't. It might work if the demand on the secondary isn't too great, but solid wire will give you much better results due to having a bigger core.
It will be fine. The diameter will be a little larger so you can't wind as many turns. also, I never saw varnished stranded wire, so you would have to do your own varnishing. #4? 100 amps?
I assume that you are talking about stranded wire with plastic insulation. The strands are not actually braided, but only twisted together. There is such a thing as braided wire, but it is a special product for high frequency. The plastic insulation, usually polyvinyl chloride (PVC) will likely get too hot in a transformer. The stranded wire with PVC insulation is also much thicker than magnet wire of equal copper size. The number of turns that will fit will be greatly reduced. You can probably not successfully strip of the PVC and put on a varnish type insulation. If you wind the transformer with PVC insulated wire, the number of turns that will fit will limit the available volt-amperes to some extent and you may need to limit the load even more because the safe temperature of the PVC insulated wire is much lower than the safe temperature of magnet wire. Edit 1 Duty cycle is certainly an important factor affecting operating temperature. That could allow PVC wire to work. There still might be a problem with getting enough turns in the space available. You might consider going to a motor rewind shop to see if they will sell a small amount of magnet wire of the proper size. If you have cheap PVC, try that first and estimate how many turns you need if you need more. Magnet wire can safely run hotter, so smaller gage wire can be used. You could also see if recycle places will sell recycled magnet wire. If you can get magnet wire somewhere near large enough, you could use two or three strands in parallel.
