

The table below shows various data including both the resistance of the various wire gauges and the allowable current ( ampacity) based on a copper conductor with plastic insulation. An approximation for the resistance of copper wire may be expressed as follows:Īpproximate resistance of copper wire : 27 AWG.A solid round 18 AWG wire is about 1 mm in diameter.For the same cross section, aluminum wire has a conductivity of approximately 61% of copper, so an aluminum wire has nearly the same resistance as a copper wire smaller by 2 AWG sizes, which has 62.9% of the area.A decrease of ten gauge numbers, for example from nr. 12 to nr. 2, multiplies the area and weight by approximately 10, and reduces the electrical resistance (and increases the conductance) by a factor of approximately 10.AWG nr. 2 is about twice the diameter of AWG nr. 8 .) This quadruples the cross-sectional area and the conductance. When the diameter of a wire is doubled, the AWG will decrease by 6 .two AWG Nr. 14 wires have about the same cross-sectional area as a single AWG nr. 11 wire.) This doubles the conductance. When the cross-sectional area of a wire is doubled, the AWG will decrease by 3 .The sixth power of 39√ 92 is very close to 2, which leads to the following rules of thumb: Any two neighboring gauges (e.g., AWG A and AWG B ) have diameters whose ratio (dia. Each successive gauge number decreases the wire diameter by a constant factor. The ratio of these diameters is 1:92, and there are 40 gauge sizes from the smallest Nr. 36 AWG is 0.005 inches in diameter, and Nr. 0000 is 0.46 inches in diameter, or nearly half-an-inch. 4 Nomenclature and abbreviations in electrical distributionīy definition, Nr.Because there are also small gaps between the strands, a stranded wire will always have a slightly larger overall diameter than a solid wire with the same AWG.ĪWG is also commonly used to specify body piercing jewelry sizes (especially smaller sizes), even when the material is not metallic. The AWG of a stranded wire is determined by the cross-sectional area of the equivalent solid conductor. The AWG tables are for a single, solid and round conductor. Manufacturers of wire formerly had proprietary wire gauge systems the development of standardized wire gauges rationalized selection of wire for a particular purpose. Very fine wire (for example, 30 gauge) required more passes through the drawing dies than 0 gauge wire did.

This gauge system originated in the number of drawing operations used to produce a given gauge of wire. Increasing gauge numbers denote decreasing wire diameters, which is similar to many other non-metric gauging systems such as British Standard Wire Gauge (SWG), but unlike IEC 60228, the metric wire-size standard used in most parts of the world.


The cross-sectional area of each gauge is an important factor for determining its current-carrying ampacity. Dimensions of the wires are given in ASTM standard B 258. For other uses, see AWG (disambiguation).Īmerican wire gauge ( AWG), also known as the Brown & Sharpe wire gauge, is a logarithmic stepped standardized wire gauge system used since 1857, predominantly in North America, for the diameters of round, solid, nonferrous, electrically conducting wire.
