Consider, for a At this point, electrical wiring, a ubiquitous technology, is extremely easy to forget. Tucked away in our devices, wrapped around our walls, strung along our streets, millions of tons of thin metal filaments do the work of electrifying the world. But their work is so benign, and so natural that it doesn’t really look like technology at all. Wires move electrons simply because that’s what metals do when an electric current is applied to them: They conduct electricity.
But there’s always room for improvement. Metals conduct electricity because they contain free electrons that are not bonded to any particular atom. The more electrons move, and the faster they move, the better the metal conducts electricity. So to improve that conductivity – crucial for conserving energy produced at power plants or stored in batteries – materials scientists are often on the hunt for more complete atomic arrangements. more perfect. Their primary purpose is purity — to remove any part of foreign matter or imperfections that disrupt the flow. The more pieces of gold, the more copper the better the conductor. Anything else is just a hindrance.
“If you want something really highly conductive, then you just have to be pure,” says Keerti Kappagantula, a materials scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. That’s why she considers her own research rather “puzzling”. Her goal is to make metals conduct electricity better by making them less than pure. She would take a metal like aluminum and throw in additives like graphene or carbon nanotubes, creating an alloy. Do it the right way, Kappagantula found, and the additional material can have a strange effect: It can push metals past the theoretical limit of electrical conductivity.
In this case, the aim was to create aluminum that could compete with copper in electrical devices – a metal that conducts electricity almost twice, but also costs about twice as much. Aluminum has benefits: It’s much lighter than copper. And being the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust – a thousand times more abundant than copper – it is also cheaper and easier to mine.
Copper, on the other hand, is getting harder and harder to find as the world transitions to greener energy. Although it has been ubiquitous in electrical wiring and motors for a long time, the demand for it is still growing. An electric vehicle uses about four times as much copper as a conventional car, and much more will be needed for the electrical components of renewable power plants and the wires that connect them to the grid. . Analysts at Wood Mackenzie, an energy-focused research firm, estimates that offshore wind farm 5.5 megatons of metal will be needed over 10 years, mainly for the massive cabling inside the generator and to bring the electrons the turbines produce to shore. In recent years, the price of copper has spiked and analysts are predicting a growing shortage of the metal. Goldman Sachs recently stated that “new oil. “
Some companies changed it to aluminum if they could. In recent years, there have been a billion dollar change in components of everything from air conditioners to car parts. High-voltage power lines used aluminum wires, because they were both cheap and light, allowing wires to flow over longer distances. That aluminum is usually in its purest form and highly conductive.
