Electrical Conductors

This article may not have sufficiently encyclopedic formatting or tone. You can help Lunarpedia by formatting, editing, or reworking it.

Work on this article has outpaced copyediting on it. You can help Lunarpedia by formatting, editing, or tidying it.

This article is a resource stub. You can help Lunarpedia by expanding it.

Element	Electrical resistivity @ 20°C
Silver	15.87 nΩ·m
Copper	16.78 nΩ·m
Gold	22.14 nΩ·m
Aliminum	26.50 nΩ·m

Aluminum

aluminum is also used as a conductor here on earth, in fact you use it every day without realizing it. those HT cables have a steel core and an aluminum outer layer it's used because losses are fairly low at 110kV and the weight of the cable and cost of the towers is important

steel cored aluminum allows a longer span

Aluminum is abundant on the Moon. the principle disadvantage of Aluminum on the Earth is that is corrodes rapidly in an oxygen atmosphere. On the moon, in a vacuum environment, it would be an excellent material to use as a general purpose electrical conductor, considering that copper is not readily available on the Moon.

I expect we'll have to put up with aluminum wire on Luna though, which means higher voltages would be better

Copper

as a general conductor copper is widely used on Earth because it's cheap, reasonably flexible, reasonably light and the 2nd best conductor, but it corrodes worse than silver. However, copper is not readily available on the Moon.

Gold

Gold is is not an especially good conductor at all, though it is better than aluminum. It is very expensive, but compared to the cost of transport to the Moon from Earth, the cost is not significant.

A more important use of Gold is in Electrical Connectors

for connectors gold reigns supreme for several reasons

1. It doesn't tarnish (important on Earth, important indoors on Luna)

2. It's soft so you can make the connectors tight and they dig into each other forming a good connection.

Silver

Silver is the best known conductor, but in an oxygen rich environment it tarnishes.

In the Lunar outdoors, (in a vacuum where it can't tarnish), silver would be way better than copper, or aluminum. However, unfortunately, Silver is not readily available on the Moon, and in most cases for large scale systems we will have to make do with Aluminum.

External References

Electrical_conductor#Conductor_materials