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.

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 si 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 because it's cheap, reasonably flexible, reasonably light and the 2nd best conductor, but it corrodes worse than silver

Gold

Gold is not very good for wires, although gold plated tubes could be used for outdoor RF applications.

Gold belongs in it's own special category 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 the dig into each other forming a good connection."

Silver

Outdoors on Luna, in a vacuum, where it can't tarnish, Silver is the king of electrical conductors

in the Lunar outdoors, silver would be way better than gold, copper, or aluminum.