@chessturd said
Hopefully it affects the use/price of silver?
I know silver is the best conductor of heat and electricity or does this science have nothing to do with silver and I'm just hoping? ๐ค
When did you take science classes? Silver is NOT the best conductor of heat. Diamond is the best of the natural stuff. There are better man made deals like heat pipes but diamond does the absolute best at conducting heat. Now in fact they are making thin film diamond coatings that connect transistors to heat sinks that connects the heat from the high power transistors to the heat sink much better than the rubberized heat sink conductors of the past 30 years and heat sink compound. I know a bit about that because I work on those kind of things and have been for 60 years. I saw the transistor era start. I saw the first Sputnik when I was a teenager in Anchorage, Oct. 4 1957. I grew up with the changes of technology we live with daily now.
Silver has nothing to do with superconductivity. If all the wires of the high tension lines were made of silver the amount of energy loss might go down from 7 percent as it is now to 6 %, not a huge deal. Of course we can't do that since silver is about 50 bucks an ounce. Now we just load up the lines with huge cables made of aluminum, not the best conductor, copper is far better but we couldn't afford to build the 3000 mile long lines with copper, there isn't enough in the whole world to do that but there is abundant aluminum so we make due with what we have.
It's a matter of making the wires a bit thicker to bring down the resistance so if it takes a copper wire one inch thick to conduct X amount of current, we just make the aluminum cable an inch and a half thick and it still weighs less than the copper it replaces. For high frequency conduction, like microwave frequencies on circuit boards and conducting high frequency signals like microwave or higher, we use silver coated copper because high frequency signals fly on mainly the outside coating of wires and not much actual power is conducted in the center of the wire. The same goes for wave guides, the best way to conduct RF at super high frequencies. If the inside of the wave guides are coated with silver, it conducts more power than one say made of steel or copper or aluminum. Do you know what a wave guide is? If not I can link you to a site, assuming you give a shyte๐