I noticed that wirings have different kinds wires inside the rubber coating. Does it make any difference in terms of transferring electricity or being solid or strands have its own purposes?
In: 7
The other answers are 50% of the story (low cost with solid core vs need to flex with stranded) but there’s another detail they missed: signal type. For pure power, high current, more copper is better, so you want thick solid core. As you go higher frequency though, for things like data, the signal actually doesn’t travel in the core of the wire but rather on a thin part of the surface (called the skin effect). Because the signal only travels on the surface, you really just don’t need more wire, so you make it super thin and save money on the copper. You may be familiar with speaker wire like this.
Now here is the kicker, variable speed motors or other things that both have fast changing signals AND need high currents need an extra little detail. Just using stranded wire won’t solve the skin effect on it’s own because wires touching each other will act like one bigger wire (good for current, bad for skin effect) so you have to insulate each wire individually so now you can have a bundle of wires, each conducting current only on the surface, but still provide a path for a large current to flow.
Latest Answers