COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF THE SUSCEPTIBILITY OF COPPER AND ALUMINUM TO PROCESSING IN WIRE DRAWING PROCESS

Modern technological solutions in electrical applications require, above all, high energy efficiency. This means that in such applications, materials with the highest possible electrical conductivity should be used for conductive elements. Of all metals, copper is the natural choice. Copper cables or wires used in electrical networks and installations provide better electrical and thermal conductivity and guarantee reliability - which translates into the quality of electricity. And bad quality of energy means tangible financial losses. On the other hand, apart from physical properties, an important factor is the price of cables and wires, which is partially dependent on the price of copper on the stock exchange. The last 20 years have seen a high increase in copper prices on the markets and at the same time the price is unstable. Therefore, cheaper substitutes for copper are being sought. The natural choice is aluminum, which is currently widely used in overhead power lines. At the same time, in the case of long cables, copper products still dominate. The paper presents a synthetic comparative analysis of technological processing problems in industrial drawing processes of aluminum and copper wires used in electrical applications.. In particular, comparative analysis applied the susceptibility into formability in the wire drawing process and susceptibility to recrystallization annealing of copper and aluminum wires. The drawing process and the annealing process are simple processes for the production of wires used for electrical purposes.