Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Technology => Topic started by: syhprum on 23/04/2014 08:51:10
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Traditionally Silver has been considered to be the best electrical conductor, has any recent research found anything better ?
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Super Conductors?
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Pyrolytic graphite. It's highly anisotropic, with amazingly good electrical and thermal conductivity in one plane but more like a semiconductor in the perpendicular direction.
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At room temperature, graphene has slightly better conductivity than silver. However, graphene is a 2-dimensional conductor, and does not conduct well between the graphene layers.
"Better" can mean many things:
- In terms of cost, aluminium is "better" than silver, and silver is better than graphene - if you want to make a wires of a given resistance. (Graphene currently has a ridiculous price, if you work it out per kg).
- If mass is important for your application, then aluminium is "better" than silver.
- If ease of making high-quality joins is important, then copper or silver is "better" than aluminium.
- If ductility is important (and the quantity is small, as in semiconductor chips), gold is "best".
- ...and Superconductors beat all the rest - if you can afford the cryogenic refrigeration and the space for all the thermal insulation.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_conductivity#Resistivity_of_various_materials
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Many thanks for bringing me up to date I suspected that some exotic modern materials might have a lower resistivity but as you say how you define best leads to several other materials