Determining Resistance of a Copper Wire Without Knowing Its Resistivity

[Archimedess]

Homework Statement

A copper wire has an internal diameter $d_1$ of $10$ $cm$ and an external diameter $d_2$ of 20 $cm$. If the wire is $20m$ long what is the resistance of the wire?

Relevant Equations

$R=\rho\frac{l}{\Sigma}$

What i did is: $R=\rho\frac{l}{\Sigma}=\rho\frac{l}{d_2^2\pi-d_1^2\pi}$

The problem is that I don't have $\rho$. Is there a way to find $R$ without knowing it?

Many thanks.

 

[willem2]

The problem is that I don't have ρρ\rho. Is there a way to find RRR without knowing it?

If you know the material, you can look it up

 

[Archimedess]

If you know the material, you can look it up

This is from a past exam of my course (we can't use any table during exam), a friend of mine says that you don't need it and you can find it anyway.. I doubt it.

 

[Orodruin]

If you know the material, you can look it up

Indeed. In real life, problems do not come with all the input data that is required to solve them. In fact, half the work of problem solving (if not more) is identifying the input needed and looking for a way of obtaining this information. In the case of finding the resistivity of Cu, a quick Google search should suffice if you do not have a table of material properties readily at hand (the Google search may be quicker anyway).

 

[Orodruin]

This is from a past exam of my course (we can't use any table during exam), a friend of mine says that you don't need it and you can find it anyway.. I doubt it.

You can easily show that quantities of dimension length are not sufficient to determine resistance by using dimensional analysis. Using lengths only it is impossible to build a quantity that has the correct physical dimension.