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I wanted to know what are the techniques employed in heavy vehicles to avoid short circuit or protect if short circuit happens? Since the batteries in heavy vehicles are highly powerful and short circuit will be very dangerous I think. please advise.I can think of fuses apart from that any other techniques.

rajesh
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    Think about how powerful mains is. And what is its protection against short circuits? oh, surprise, fuses. – PlasmaHH Aug 07 '15 at 08:20
  • In the case of mains if short circuit the current can be routed to earth but in vehicles you cannot do it I think. – rajesh Aug 08 '15 at 04:19

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All cars I know of only have fuses. The fuses do a pretty good job at protecting the wiring from a short circuit or overload (provided someone did not stick a 40A fuse wher an 8A fuse should be).

Pentium100
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Vehicles are the part of automotive engineering and in automotive power supply design normally we use short circuit protection design to avoid it from getting short circuited.

Other than short circuit there are parameters like Load and Dump protection, reverse polarity protection, undervoltage/overvoltage protection usually needs to take care for automotive power supply design.

Sanjeev Kumar
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  • But generally power supply is drawn directly from batteries i think. – rajesh Aug 07 '15 at 08:32
  • It will be drawn from the battery itself, but before supplying to the peripheral these protection needs to provide. And most important things, based on the peripheral supply voltage need to buck or boost the voltage from the battery. Battery voltage might be either 12V/24V and most of the peripheral will work on 5V/3.3V/1.8V/1.2V/1V etc. – Sanjeev Kumar Aug 07 '15 at 08:41
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Not all vehicles have fuses, there are some with circuit breakers. These breakers are often designed to make a loud "click" when they open so the operator knows something is wrong.

Jeanne Pindar
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  • Do you know what vehicles use circuit breakers? Just curious. – Tim Spriggs Mar 29 '16 at 20:34
  • Harleys, for one. If you go to an auto parts store's website and search for circuit breakers, you may find others. There are also universal breakers that will fit into an automotive fuse holder. – Jeanne Pindar Mar 30 '16 at 23:38