NESS ENGINEERING
TECHNICAL DATA
SKIN DEPTH

 
Because high frequency signals do not penetrate well into good conductors, the resistance associated with a conductor at these high frequencies will be higher than the dc resistance. This effect is know as the skin effect since the high frequency current flows in a thin layer near the surface of the conductor. The formula to determine the effective skin depth for a conductor is shown below.

Equation to calculate the skin depth of a copper conductor for copper

In this case, d is the skin depth (in m), f is the frequency of interest (in Hz), m is the permeability of the material (mo, or 1.2566E-6 H/m for most materials),s is the conductivity of the material (in Siemens or 1/r where r is the resistivity in ohm-m).

Diagram to show effective resistance of a circular wire due to skin effect

If a circular wire is used with radius a, the effective resistance of the wire can be calculated as shown below where l is the length of the wire and the other variables are defined as above.

Equation to calculate the effective resistance of a wire due to skin depth when a >> d

The above equation applies for those cases where the skin depth is between 0 and the wire radius, a. If the skin depth is larger than the wire radius, then the equivalent ac resistance of the wire is no different than the dc resistance and is merely determined by the standard formula using the entire wire cross-sectional area. As the frequency approaches zero (dc), the skin depth becomes infinite and as the freqency increases, the skin depth becomes smaller and smaller.

The following table shows how the skin depth varies with common conductor materials (copper and aluminum) for typical pulsed power and power conditioning frequencies in the range of 1 kHz to 1 GHz.
 
 

Frequency (Hz)

Skin Depth in Copper (cm)

Skin Depth in Aluminum (cm)

1000

2.08E-1

2.62E-1

10,000

6.56E-2

8.27E-2

100,000

2.08E-2

2.62E-2

1,000,000

6.56E-3

8.27E-3

10,000,000

2.08E-3

2.62E-3

100,000,000

6.56E-4

8.27E-4

1,000,000,000

2.08E-4

2.62E-4

 

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Last Modified: December 6, 2002

© 1999 Richard M. Ness and Ness Engineering