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
Aluminum	26.50 nΩ·m
	Lower number => better conductor

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 cable allows a longer span and is the most common form of aluminum wire used for HT lines on Earth.

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 it's not great, but considering that copper is not readily available on the Moon it's expected we'll have to put up with aluminum wire. This means voltages higher than 110V would probably be better. In some places on Earth it is illegal to use aluminum for general wiring mostly as a result of fire risk caused by contractors using too light a gauge in the past.

Copper

As a general conductor copper is widely used on Earth because it's cheap, reasonably flexible, reasonably light and the 2nd best conductor. Copper allows for ease of soldered and crimped/clamped connections. It corrodes worse than silver, this is usually seen in older wires that have turned green.

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 but not per unit weight as gold is much heavier. It is very expensive, but compared to the cost of transport to the Moon from Earth, the cost is not significant. Gold is usually only used as a conductor in very specialized applications such as very fine wires like those used to wire bond integrated circuits to their lead frames.

A more important everyday 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