Originally Posted by
tdracer
Hence if they'd used aluminum they would have needed so much more to get the same conductivity that I doubt it would have saved any weight as copper is much more conductive (i.e. lower resistance) than aluminum. I believe titanium is even worse than aluminum.
Aluminum isn't too much worse than copper as far as conductivity goes. Copper has about 2/3 the resistivity of aluminum (the inverse of conductivity). And it is frequently used for larger electrical conductors due to weight advantages offsetting the larger conductor size needed (just not in home branch circuits
). An aluminum aircraft skin will do just fine to attenuate lightning strikes. Titanium, on the other hand, is a pretty poor conductor (about 25x the resistivity of copper). What it will do is withstand higher temperatures. But the maximum temperature tolerable when dissipating a lightning strike is limited by the composite structure the mesh is embedded in.