Electric field from Skin Effect on a wire

[Jdo300]

Hello All,

I am wondering if when a sharp pulse is injected into a piece of wire, if that piece of wire produces a radially directed external electric whose magnitude is proportional to the skin depth of the current into the wire and the voltage potential of the input pulse.

To elaborate more on this idea. I know that if you put a high frequency pulse, (say rise time of 1uS) that the pulse leading edge could be likened to a 1MHz signal traveling on the surface of the conductor. And the resulting current would have a skin depth of 76 um according to the calculator on this site: http://www.calculatoredge.com/electronics/skin effect.htm.

My question is, if you were to freeze the pulse while it were in the center of the wire and look at a cross section of the wire, would it appear that there is an electric field potential between the surface and the skin depth distance into the wire? So if the potential of the pulse were, say, 10V, would the potential between the surface and the skin-depth distance into the wire be 10V? If this is the case, one could calculate the internal electric field potential using the voltage potential and distance into the wire (I know I am making a LOT of assumptions here but bear with me).

I know that for an ideal conductor, the internal electric field has to be 0, so that would imply that there would have to be an external electric field that is equal and opposite of the internal one to balance it out? If this is true, then could one use the voltage of the pulse, and the skin depth to estimate what the magnitude of the external electric field induced from the pulse should be?

If I am way off base here, please let me know. Any comments greatly appreciated.

- Jason O

 

[anorlunda]

To really understand skin effect, you must think about eddy currents. The eddy currents create opposing fields. The eddy current strength drains the deeper it penetrates into the conductor.
To describe it accurately, you need Maxwell's Equations.