Why is copper a good conductor of heat?

In today’s era, nobody can live without electricity. It is the need of everyone in every part of the world in every corner. Each and everyone is associated to each and every field need electricity but have you ever wondered that how the electricity came into existence or more appropriately to say that how is the electricity present in all the corners of the world. Well, the basic cause is that we use the copper wire for the transmission of electricity. Thus copper is the greatest conductor of heat and electricity.

Now the question arises that why are we relying on copper? Well, we can say that all the metals present in nature are one way or the other very good conductors of heat. Some are very good some are a little bad. The metals are the solid chemical elements. To study the basic atomic structure of a specific metal atom, they have some of the valence electrons in their valence shell. The valence shell is the last shell of the atom. Every atom requires stable state at every state, to attain stability an atom needs to have eight electrons in its last shell.

The atoms either can lose some of the electrons for stability or they can just gain them so that they could attain the stable electronic configuration. The metals generally have one to four electrons in its valence shell. Thus they usually lose the electrons. The electrons are the negatively charged particles; due to this they usually give some additional charge to the substance. When a metal loses its electrons they will certainly heat up as there will be the increase of the free electrons. The free movements of electrons will certainly increase the heat and electricity conductivity.

The basic configuration of copper is:

Symbol: Cu

Atomic number: 29

Atomic mass: 63.54 AMU

Ionic charge: +3

Valency: 3

In the electricity applications, there is the number of copper uses. Most of the metals are considered as the very good conductors but copper is the best and it loses three electrons at the room temperature. All the copper atoms together can lose a very large number of electrons and thus can conduct the electricity in a huge amount. The copper is also a very cheap metal thus is used in all sort of applications. 

There are many of the applications of copper in the field of electricity:

•        Wiring of electricity at home, offices, schools, shops, malls, etc.

•        For the automated induction of electricity in the generators and invertors which are used in the cases of power cut and loss of electricity.

•        Used in the capacitors for the conduction of electricity in the batteries.

In the thermal heating process the copper is used as:

•        It is used in making the bottom surfaces of the utensils as it has the good heat conduction.

•        It is used for the heat exchanger in the hot water tanks.

•        This is also used as the heat sinks in the computers, the disk drives, the TVs sets, and many more things.

These are some of the uses of copper in the conduction of heat and electricity.