Wire sizes

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Background
Imagine you were an 19th century engineer and were given the task to sort up among the
different sizes wires your employer used. The simplest way would be to use an aritmetic
scale: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and so on. This would give you an awful lot of sizes. Worse,
2 is 100% larger than 1, but 9 is only 12,5% larger than 8. Here the mathematicians come to
the rescue: Use a geometric series. In a geometric series, the sizes increases with a fixed
increment. The simplest geometric series is 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64...
Although neat and simple, this series is a little bit too coarse for wire size. Two different
series were developed, one in the United States in the 1850's and one in France in the 1870's.
The former is known as Brown and Sharp gauge, now called American Wire Gauge or AWG
for short, the latter is a Reynard series in sq.mm.

American Wire Gauge

The diameter of corresponding to an AWG size is calculated by this expression:
D = (92 ^ ((36-AWG)/39))*0.005 inch
The higher the number, the smaller the size. Each size is about 25% larger than the previous.
This mean moving three sizes doubles the cross sectional area and moving ten sizes, e.g.
from 20 to 10 AWG, increases the area about tenfold. Only every other sizes is used in
reality. The increase in area between these is about 60%: I.e. 18 AWG is about 60% larger
than 20 AWG.
Size 0 is often written as 1/0 and the size -1 is written as 2/0, pronounced two-aught. The
scale ends with 4/0 AWG

Circular Mils
A circular mil is the area of a circle with the diameter of 1/1000". In practice this number is
about a thousand times to small to be usable for wire sizes. Therefore, sizes are usually given
in thousands of circular mils, denoted kcmil or previously MCM. One kcmil 0.5067 mm2,
which means that for practical purposes the 1 mm2 = 2 kcmil can be used as approximation.
(The error is only 1.3%)
Kcmil sizes are used instead of AWG for sizes larger than 4/0 AWG. The smallest standard
size is 250 kcmil, the largest 2000 kcmil. The sizes follow no obvious logic.

Metric Wire Sizes

The French military engineer Charles Reynard came up with a neater formula than Brown:
10^(n/10) where n=1, 2, 3 and so on. Just like the AWG, each sizes is 25% large than the
previous. The neat part is that moving ten steps increases the area excactly tenfold. Normally,

only every other size is used. This means you can write the formula as 10^(n/5). The
resulting numbers are then:
10^(0/5) = 1
10^(1/5) = 1.5848
10^(2/5) = 2.5119
10^(3/5) = 3.9811
10^(4/5) = 6.3096
10^(5/5) = 10
In practice these numbers are always rounded. However, for some reason only the sizes from
1.0 mm2 to 25 mm2 follow this logic. Standard sizes up to 1000 mm2 are used, but sizes 3595 mm2 follow a different series. (See the table below) The metric wire sizes in the electrical
industry are always in mm2, never in mm dia. The size of other types of wire, e.g. fence
wire, is often given in mm dia.

Japanese sizes
Japan and Korea use a separate system. It appears to have been based on the American Wire
Gauge, but the sizes are in sq. mm, rounded and with fewer steps.

Comment
The ampacity of wires depend on a number of factors and converting between metric and
AWG sizes is a bit more involved than it seems. Ampacities for wire sizes from 18 AWG 1000 kcmil and 1.0 - 500 mm can be found here
AWG <=> Metric
AWG
mm Metric
0.50
# 20
0.519
0.75
# 18
0.823
1.0
# 16
1.310
1.5
# 14
2.080
2.5
# 12
3.310
4.0
# 10
5.261
6.0
#8
8.367
10
#6
13.30
16

#4

21.15

#3
#2

26.67
33.62

25

35
#1

42.41

#0
# 2/0

53.49
67.43

50

70
# 3/0

85.01
95

# 4/0

107.2
120

kcmil <=> Metric

kcmil mm Metric
250
127
150
300
152
350
177
185
400
203
240
500
253
300
600
304
700
355
750
380
400
800
405
900
456
500
1000
507
630
1250
633
1500
760
800
1750
887
1000
2000
1013

Japanese sizes
mm mm
0.75 100
1.25 150
2.0
200
3.5
250
5.5
325
8.0
400
14
500
22
600
38
800
60
1000