Copper busbar, rod and bare copper wire
This is the uninsulated half of the Novaton range: flat copper bar for busbar work, drawn copper rod, and solid bare copper wire. All of it is semi-finished. No enamel, no coating — the metal arrives ready to be cut, bent, punched and assembled into your own design.
Akvaton has drawn copper in Rivne, Ukraine since 1991. What that means in practice is that temper, section and edge type get agreed with the people who actually roll the bar, rather than with a trading desk.
Busbar and rod are made to EN 13601, bare round wire to EN 13602:2010. The plant is ISO 9001 certified, testing runs on three levels in our own laboratory, and every batch leaves with a test report. Up to 100% of the charge is recycled copper.
Material and temper
The conductor is electrolytic copper to EN 1977 — grades Cu-ETP CW004A and Cu-ETP1 CW003A. Where a low oxygen content matters, typically for brazed joints, we run oxygen free Cu-OF CW008A instead.
Two tempers are held: soft and hard. Annealed bar in the H035 R200 condition gives tensile strength from 200 N/mm², hardness HB/HV 35–65, elongation from 35% and resistivity of 0.01724 Ω·mm²/m. That combination is what lets a profile survive forming in the panel shop without cracking at the bend.
Intermediate conditions are not a catalogue item. If your design calls for half hard material, it goes through as a custom order against your specification.
Sizes and edges
Soft bar is produced from 1.0 to 7.0 mm thick, and the available width depends on the thickness you pick.
| Thickness, mm |
Width, mm |
| 1.0 |
5.0–9.0 |
| 1.6 |
3.0–15.0 |
| 2.0 |
2.6–21.0 |
| 3.0 |
3.0–30.0 |
| 4.0 |
4.0–40.0 |
| 5.0 |
5.0–40.0 |
| 6.0 |
6.5–30.0 |
| 7.0 |
7.0–28.0 |
Common switchgear sections such as 12×4 mm or 10×3 mm sit comfortably inside those bands. Anything outside the table is quoted against your drawing.
Edges come three ways: SH for sharp corners, RD for rounded, and CE — flat bars with a full radius.
Two calculations come up in almost every enquiry. Cross-section is width times thickness, so a 40 × 5 mm bar gives 200 mm². Mass per metre is that section multiplied by the reference density of copper, 8.9 g/cm³, which works out at roughly 1.78 kg/m for the same bar. Both are as approximate as the density figure itself, so for the commercial weight of a batch use the specification we send back.
One caution: current rating does not follow from those numbers. It depends on how the bars are spaced and oriented and on how well the enclosure ventilates, which makes it the equipment designer’s call, not the metal supplier’s.
Soft bar and wire ship in coils, on K 500/36 and K 800/36 spools, or cut to length in 1000–6000 mm pieces.
Rod and bare wire
Drawn rod is the same material to the same standard as the flat bar. Most of it goes out as feedstock for busbar trunking and further processing.
Round bare wire with a bright surface is made to EN 13602:2010. Soft drawn runs Ø 0.16–8.0 mm in tempers A021 to A033; hard drawn runs Ø 0.16–2.5 mm, R460 down to R360. Resistivity is 0.01724 Ω·mm²/m soft and 0.01776–0.01845 Ω·mm²/m hard. Both electrolytic and oxygen free grades are available.
Buyers take it mostly as feedstock for enamelling into winding wire, for bare and insulated cables and flexible cords, and for contact connections and earthing. It packs in coils and on drums.
Where it goes
Switchgear and distribution boards are the main outlet, together with busbar assemblies and trunking. The same profile feeds transformer connections, electric and traction motors, and earthing systems. Busbar trunking is also how power gets distributed inside data centers, and enquiries from that sector are quoted from this same range against the assembly drawing.
How to buy
Directly from the plant. EU customers are served through Elktrim in Poland, our representative there, which holds stock and handles logistics and customs clearance on the European side — so the delivery itself is intra-EU.
Minimum order on standard items is 20 kg for the EU and 3 kg within Ukraine. Pricing is per kilogram, tied to the copper exchange and dependent on size, temper and quantity, which is why there is no published price list. Send us the section, temper, edge type and quantity, and a specification with price and lead time comes back.
