Thread: melting steel with electricity

how much electricity is required to melt a net of 4mm steel chain

Probably enough to do it in.

2.6 ghz
x radio might do well.

More information is needed. What is the application? How large is the net? AC or DC? The more information you can give us about what you are trying to do, the better we can answer.

presumably you're not talking about something like an electric arc furnace, but putting electricity through a wire net until the metal melts ?

i'm not sure of the answer, but i doubt whether a standard electricity supply will do it
i once melted the plastic coating off a copper wire while doing electrogalv experiments, but came nowhere near to melting the wire itself
considering that the melting point of mild steel is nearly 500°C higher than that of copper, that's an even bigger undertaking

I can't picture how your net is constructed, but I think you'd have to start out by figuring out how much current it takes to melt a 4 mm steel wire. Take the melting point of the steel, and do a heat transfer calculation to determine the rate of heat loss per meter of wire due to radiation and convection at that temperature. Heat transfer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . Then find the resistance of the wire at that temperature. The electrical power in a wire is equal to the resistance multiplied by the current squared. Equate i-squared R to the heat loss you calculated in the heat transfer calc, and solve for the current.

If you are connecting your power source to the net at one point, then the current will flow in two directions in the wire you connected it to, and melt at the point of connection. The current supplied by the source would be about 2 times the current you calculated above. If your power source is connected to multiple places on the net, then the problem gets more complicated, but the melting current in any individual wire would be as calculated above, or actually it would be a bit less because there would be a hot spot where two wires crossed.

I think this was a drive-by questioning.

Theoretically Looked ,the more the best,but why do you melt steel chain ，maybe you want to steal