copper crisis?

It's unfortunate that adding copper to aluminum (most abundant metal) or aluminum to copper basically makes either one way worse than if you'd left it pure.

Like you'd think by adding say 10% aluminum to copper you'd get a wire that was some small percentage less conductive than copper but still retained most of copper's other nice properties, but IIRC it basically ruins it and above some pretty low percentage aluminum you can't pull a copper/aluminum alloy into a wire, anyway.

You could probably put DC-DC converters on, and run the collecting feeds sort of like 70V audio line, only backwards and at HV DC. There would be some safety issues, for sure.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Time to invest in copper mines I guess...and humans will simply have to adapt.

Or some genius will notice something we've been overlooking.

Or at some point it will become cost effective to mine the asteroids.

Like we've been doing since our distant ancestors left the trees!

John :-#)#

If you only consider big-scale projects, superconducting motors and generators are small, with low copper content, and kilohertz transformers are likewise compact and need less wire volume. Copper's ductility, however, and wire-drawing technology, are always going to be engineering assets.

"Gold is for the mistress, silver for the maid, copper for the craftsman, cunning at his trade..."

Powered by clean fusion power, no doubt. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The USA is blessed. We have coal, copper, lead, tin, uranium, molybdenum, lithium, nickel, phosphates, silver, rare earth elements, bauxite, gold, iron, mercury, zinc, potash, tungsten, salt, oil, natural gas, water, sand, trees, grass, and girls.

If so, now may be the time to consider speculating and go long. A few days ago the Washington Examiner had a article saying copper has fallen

Well, you couldn't make them any less beautiful:

Bingham Canyon Mine:

A relative of mine used to work there, in his opinion it all kind of went to s*it once Rio Tinto bought it out and their management came in; lots of perks for the execs while the little guy got extra shifts and pay cuts, the usual. Doing truck maintenance for UPS was a much better gig

Yeah, well, you're the physicist here what are y'all even doing. You guys put a man on the moon, thought there was a whole team just thinking s*it up and then another team of men backing them up:

https://hb11.energy/investors/ I met Heinrich Hora when he gave a talk on the project. Hydrogen - boron fusion doesn't produce neutrons, so it is cleaner than hydrogen or deuterium fusion, through it does need higher temperatures (which do seem to be attainable). I haven't put in any money yet, but I'm thinking about it.

Unfortunately it is cursed with a lot of people who incorrectly think they know what they are talking about. Donald Trump comes to mind, and Jake Isks, amongst others. The US isn't unique in this respect, but they do seem to pay more attention to their idiots than they really should.

So don't mix, CCA works quite well for many tasks.

The initial hype about fullerene nanotubes hasn't lead to any commercial products yet. Maybe it will eventually.

John Larkin will ignore it as marketing hype right up to the point where he can buy reels of the stuff from DigiKey.

You mean like adding an impurity to a substance lowers the melting point no matter the melting point of the impurity? Yeah, it's like that. That's why they can use the melting point as a quick measure of purity.

A paper on the conductivity of copper aluminum alloys, from the good ol' days (1937):

It sez when alloying aluminum with copper at just 7.7% aluminum the conductivity is down to 16% of pure copper

What is wrong with aluminium cables ? The electric conductivity is only slightly worse than in copper, just make the cables somewhat thicker (and also save some mass).

Get rid of the bulky 51/60 Hz AC distribution (which needs bulky transformers) and replace it with HVDC/MVDC/LVDC distribution with small high frequency transformers.

For LVDC distribution, standardize some voltages, such as:

- 1500 Vdc: fits into the EU LV directive and a lot of LVD certified electric components can be used

- 400 Vdc: Common in EV and in fast chargers. Also 380 Vdc (+/-190 Vdc) is a common voltage in data centers and also increasingly in telecom centers

- 48 Vdc, common telecom voltage. Also PoE

Are these used for anything else than electric clocks driven by AC mains ?

In India, they make TVs, computers and kitchen utilities that operate from 48 Vdc. These are intended for small local village nets driven by solar panels (e.g. four 12 V panels). This avoids much of the DC/AC/DC conversion losses.

If you go to the trouble of setting up a grid system. Stick a battery bank next to you solar cells and/or windmill and you need a much smaller grid,and less wire.

Long runs tend to be cheaper if you convert to higher voltage and lower current for the long run, and convert back down again at the point of use. The utility companies having been doing this for a century or so now.

The main point is that telephone systems used to be set up around a stack of four 12V lead-acid cells, so 48V is a kind of industry standard. Lead acid cells aren't as good as lithium ion cells, but if you can sell good old-fashioned lead acid batteries why spend time and energy on offering a better system?

Individual solar cells produce a roughly hyperbolic current versus voltage curve. You get maximum power by operating at about 0.46V.

You can stack 36 of them to get an array that will charge a 12V lead acid battery. Running a smaller number into an inverter and using mark-to-space modulation to tweak the voltage step-up can let you get close to optimal performance, but that takes design work. People tend to avoid doing that, if they can get away without it.

You can get solid plated copper wire from Amazon or ebay. It's intended for jewelry makers, is very hard, and a terrible electrical and thermal conductor. Real copper bus wire is soft and much more expensive.

When a better gig is available, take it. We outlawed slavery in 1865.

I've wondered why various minerals are concentrated in smallish clumps here and there. Copper here, uranium there, gold somewhere else. We're very lucky that it's not all uniformly distributed, PPMs or PPBs of important stuff uniformly in the rocks everywhere.

Nice planet.