New inclusions to the old stuff: Info on magnet wire coatings! From all the discussion on this group about building ones own capacitors and what types of materials make good coil forms, I became interested in obtaining some hard (or semi-hard) data on different types of polymers. I was also interested when someone (?) asked whether ABS was a good material for coil forms - I had no idea. It seems that it is much preferable to PVC as Richard guessed. I thought I'd share the results of my library searches: First, I'd like to list some of the plastics with their chemical name and thier abreviations. Trade names are listed if they are well known. chemical name abreviation aka notes ------------- ----------- --- ------ polyethylene PE polythene-British! CH2-CH2 monomer HDPE High density PE LDPE Low density PE polypropylene PP replace one H in PE by CH3 polyvinyl chloride PVC replace one H in PE by one Cl atom polyvinylidene chloride CPVC PVDC replace two H in PE by two Cl polystyrene PS replace H in PE by a benzene ring polyvinyl flouride PVF replace H in PE by F atom polyvinylidene flouride PVDF Kynar repace two H in PE by two F atoms *wire wrap insul. polymethyl methacrylate PMMA Plexiglas Lucite Perspex (Jim Oliver) polytetraflouroethylene PTFE Teflon replace all H in PE by F atoms polychlorotrifloroethylene PCTFE Kel-F replace 3 H in PE with F one with Cl polyamide 6 PA 6 Nylon 6 polyamide 66 PA 66 Nylon 66 polyamide-imide PAI Torlon polyurethane PUR polycarbonate PC Lexan Polyacetal POM Delrin polyethlene terephthalate PET Mylar co-polymer of PE cellulose actetate butyrate CAB Butyrate cellulose nitrate CN "Laquer" *typical constituent laquers acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene ABS Cycopac ter-polymer of polystyrene * warning Jim Oliver says this name may apply to may many diff materials polyimide PI Kapton polyvinyl formal ? Formvar wire coating OK, there are zillions of others, but these are the ones I picked because I heard of them before... A couple of comments: Notice that there are many polymers which share a common structure with polyethylene, all that changes is replacing one or more of the H atoms in (PE) with some other atom or group of atoms. Then there are plastics which are called co-polymers or ter-polymers. A co- polymer is just taking two different monomers and sticking them together in a unit cell before polymerizing. Example: PET. Likewsie, a ter-polymer is just sticking three monomers into a unit cell and then polymerizing. A very common example is ABS which is used as sewar and drainage pipe. Now for the useful stuff. What are the electrical properties of some of these polymers? The most useful properties in my mind are the dielectric constant (or permittivity), the dielectric strenght, and the dissipation factor. All of these properties are dependent on temperature and frequency, but amazingly they also depend somewhat on the actual thickness of the material (as in thin films). ----A couple of notes: All three properties mentioned above depend on frequency, but it turns out that for many non-polar polymers (ie PE) that the dielectric constant and dissipation factor do not depend much on frequency. I'll show some data for some of the plastics I could find. However, nobody seems to have data on the frequency dependence of the dielectric strength. It is best just to assume that this was done at DC. One property which is not well known for polymers is that the breakdown electric field or dielectric strength (VOLTS/INCH etc...) depends on the actual thickness of the film. Typically, as the film gets thinner, the dielectric strength goes up!!! For example, LDPE has a strength of 800volts per mil at 80 mils, but this goes up to 1400volts/mil at 20mils!! Polystyrene exceeds even this! Finally what is dissipation factor? It is a measure of how lossy the material is to alternating electric fields (as in Tesla coils and tank capacitors). It is defined by Ir --- = tangent (delta) = DF Ic where Ir is the resistive or dissipative current and Ic is the capacitive or displacement or reactive current. Delta is the phase angle between these currents (in the complex plane). Another expression which contains the same information is the Power Factor. For those familiar with this term they are related by: PF=DF/SQRT(1+DF^2) For small DF, then PF is approximately equal to DF. Obvisously, one would like to have DF as small as possible for low loss, high Q systems. In fact, for the purposes of approximation, the Q of a capacitor with low DF or PF is simply Q=1/DF=1/PF Absolute power lost in the system is: 1. goes up with the square of the voltage gradient (electric field) 2. goes up linearly with the volume of the dielectric in the field ( as Richard said, make your coil forms thin) 3. goes up linearly with increasing dielectric constant 4. generally increases with frequency polymer dielectric dielectric dissipation constant strength factor 50Hz / 1Mhz (Kv/cm) 50Hz / 1Mhz (x10^-3) -------- ----------- ----------- ----------- LDPE 2.29 / 2.28 370 .15 / .08 HDPE 2.35 / 2.34 -- .24 / .20 PP 2.27 / 2.25 240 .40 / .50 PVC-plasticized 4-8 / 4-5 270 80 / 120 PS 2.5 / 2.5 200-300 .1-.4/.05-.4 ABS 2.4-5/2.4-3.8 ~400 3-8 / 2-15 PMMA 3.3-3.9/2.2-3.2 140 40-60/4-40 POM 3.7 / 3.7 400 5 / 5 PTFE 2.1 / 2.1 480 .2 / .2 PCTFE 2.3-2.8/2.3-2.5 550 1 / 20 PA-6 3.8 / 3.4 400 10 / 30 PA-66 8 / 4 600 140 / 80 PC 3.0 / 2.9 380 .7 / 10 PET 4.0 / 4.0 420 2 / 20 PI 3.5 / 3.4 560 2 / 5 PUR-linear 5.8 / 4.0 >300 120 / 70 PUR-thermoset 3.6 / 3.4 240 50 / 50 PUR-thermoplas 6.6 / 5.6 300 30 / 60 CAB 3.7 / 3.5 400 6 / 21 Silicone 3.6 200 5-13 / 7 Another comparison: polymer Dielectric constant / Dissipation Factor (x10^-3) 100 Hz 1000 Hz 1 Mhz 10 Mhz ABS 2.8/5 2.8/6 2.8/8 2.8/7 PMMA 3.6/62 3.2/58 3.1/40 2.9/33 PC 3.1/1 3.1/1.3 3.1/7 3.1/11 PE 2.3/.1 2.3/.1 2.3/.1 2.3/.1 PA-6 4.2/31 3.8/24 3.8/31 4.0/20 Magnet wire coatings from Phelps-Dodge: All data pertain to 18 gauge magnet wires Build= thickness of coating Coating What's it made of Build DC ---------- ----------------- ----- breakdown Thermaleze-T (TZT) polyester-imide 2.8mils 11kV Armored Polythemaleze 3.05mils 11kV (APTZ) modified polyester& modified polyamide-imide Imideze (ML) Aromatic polyimide 2.9mils 12kV Formvar modified polyviynyl 3.0mils 10kV formal Sodereze modified polyurethane 2.9mils 8.5kV Nyleze Polyurethane 2.9mils 8.5kV & polyamide * Note: for the dielectric breakdown, I'm not exactly sure of what they're takling about since for some of the materials one would get 12kV/3mils =4KV/mil which doesn't realyy make sense - it's too big by a rather wide margin, I think. 1Kv/mil is more reasonable. Anyway, here's the dielectric constant/DF numbers for these matearials: Material Dielectric Const. / DF x 10^-3 1kHz 100kHz 1Mhz rating TZT 3.7/5.6 3.56/16.4 3.58/21.5 3rd APTZ 3.86/6.9 3.69/22.1 3.67/26.6 5th ML 3.34/0.9 3.3/5.7 3.36/9.8 2nd to teflon Formvar 3.6/11.2 3.41/25.2 3.37/28.4 5th Soldereze 3.85/11.3 3.66/20.7 3.66/23.1 4th Nyleze 4.07/19.7 3.78/27.1 3.75/27.2 6th References: 1. Polymer Engineering Principles, Richard C. Progelhof and James Throne 2. Plastics for Electronics, Martin T. Goosey 3. Handbook of Plastics in Electronics, Dan Grzegorczyk and George Feineman 4. SPI Plastics Engineering Handbook, Society of the Plasitics Industry 5. Electrical Engineer's Handbook, Pender - 4th Edition 6. Phelps-Dodge magnet wire product data Plastics sources: probably best to check your local distributors, but there is a mail order company called US Plastic Corp @800-537-9724 (catalog). They have rod/sheet/tubing of PVC, PMMA, CAB, POM, PE, PS. Of particlular note: Butyrate tubing up to 6 " diameter * lower loss coil forms Polystyrene tubing to 4 " dia * very low loss coil form 4x8ft LDPE sheet 60mil or other * Richard's Capacitors If you all are sick of seeing this I'll refrain from futher posts! -Ed