American wire gauge Totally Explained

Everything about American Wire Gauge totally explained

American wire gauge (AWG), also known as the Brown & Sharpe wire gauge, is a standardized wire gauge system used since 1857 in the United States and other countries for the diameters of round, solid, nonferrous, electrically conducting wire. The steel industry uses a different numbering system for their wire thickness gauges (for example, W&M Wire Gauge or US Steel Wire Gauge or the different Music Wire Gauge) so data below doesn't apply to steel wire. Since AWG is specifically for electrical conductors, the cross-sectional area of each gauge is an important factor for determining its current-carrying capacity.
   Increasing gauge numbers give decreasing wire diameters, which is similar to many other non-metric gauging systems. This is derived from the fact that the gauge number is related to the number of drawing operations that must be used to produce a given gauge of wire; very fine wire (for example, 30 gauge) requires more passes through the drawing dies than does 0 gauge wire.
   The AWG size is one of the essential specifications that are printed on data cables. For instance, an AWG of 24 is common for network cables such as a Category 5 UTP, and an AWG of 26 is the norm for Serial ATA cables.
   Although the AWG tables are normally for a single, solid, round conductor, there are many cases in which AWG is applied to wires with multiple strands. When a stranded wire needs to be converted to an AWG equivalent size, the cross-sectional area of the conductor which determines its current-carrying capacity and electrical resistance (not its diameter), is taken as the determining factor. This permits stranded wire to have a slightly different diameter than solid wire having the same AWG.
   AWG is also commonly used to specify body piercing jewelry sizes, especially smaller sizes.

Formula

By definition, No. 36 AWG is 0.005 inches diameter, and No. 0000 is 0.46 inches diameter. The ratio of these sizes is 92, and between them are 38 sizes, with equal ratios between each adjacent pair of sizes. (The 40 different sizes result in 39 size changes.) (Sizes with multiple zeros are successively larger than No. 0 and can be denoted using "number of zeros/0", for example 4/0 for 0000.) Therefore, the diameter of a No. n AWG wire is ť

d_n = 0.005~mathrm

The "Approximate stranded metric equivalents" column lists commonly available cables in the format "number of strands / diameter of individual strand (mm)" which is the common nomenclature describing cable construction within an overall cross-sectional area.  Some common cables are midway between two AWG sizes.  Cables sold in Europe are normally labeled according to the combined cross section of all strands in mm², which can be compared directly with the

Area column.
   In the North American electrical industry, conductors larger than 4/0 AWG are generally identified by the area in thousands of circular mils (kcmil), where 1 kcmil = 0.5067 mm². A circular mil is the area of a wire one mil in diameter. One million circular mils is the area of a cylinder with 1000 mil = 1 inch diameter. An older abbreviation for one thousand circular mils is MCM.
   Outside North America, wire sizes for electrical purposes are usually given as the cross sectional area in square millimeters. International standard manufacturing sizes for conductors in electrical cables are defined in IEC 60228.
   Note that the area in mm² may differ somewhat from the numbers given in the table, depending on number of strands etc.

Pronunciation

AWG is colloquially referred to as gauge and the zeros in large wire sizes are referred to as aught . Wire sized 1 AWG is referred to as "one gauge"; similarly, smaller diameters are pronounced "x gauge", where x is the positive integer AWG number. Larger wire (#0 and up) is referred to as "one aught", "two aught" etc, depending on how many zeros are in the AWG rating.

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