What is the typical value of drift velocity of electrons in a metallic conductor?
Some of the previous answers have already referred to the sources of informatin I was going to propose, yet I’d like to add my comment hoping it helps anyway. The drift velocity is in the order of a few cm per hour. As many already said, this must not be confused with the wave propagation. In wikipedia there’s this formula: vd = I / (n q A) where n is the number of charge carriers per unit volume A is the cross sectional area q is the charge of the charge carriers (referencie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_veloc… ) An interesting analysis based on this was done in the following page: http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/miscon/spee… where the author considered a 1A current, through a wire of 0.2 cm diameter (2 mm) copper conductor: n = 8.5E+22 electrons/cm³ (considering one mobile electron per atom) Charge per electron: e = 1.6E-19 c (=q in w
