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by shiroiuma 80 days ago
>- no significant skin effect at 400Hz -> use speaker wire, lol.

What are you talking about? There's a very significant skin effect at 400Hz. Skin effect goes up with frequency. These datacenters use copper busbars, not cable, so skin effect is an important consideration.

1 comments

At 100 000 A for a 100 MW data center at 1000 V, speaker wire is a joke.

You obviously need at least a dozen stands in parallel!!

Clearly skin effect scales with frequency but, 400 Hz is still low, only 2.5x lines frequency (the scale is by the root); so the skin depth is 3mm. 3mm on each side makes for a pretty hefty rectangular cross-section.

If you could get that 100,000Amps flowing through your speaker wire, the vaporised copper and the plasma channel would probably keep your 100MW flowing, at least until your building caught fire.
Even your monster cable? ;)
Well, it'd still vaporise, but it'd sound smoother and more musical as it did it, and the soundstage from the plasma arc would be _stunning!_
It's almost worth the experiment and your cables are a sacrifice I'm willing to make. For science, of course.
You're _so_ right!

I'm pretty sure you have my delivery address from when I bought sorted Lego from you about 10 years back.

Let me know when to expect the 100,000Amp test equipment!

I shall make sure I wear better PPE than just my reading glasses.

:-)