Originally posted by johnnyg340
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Stranded cables (where the strands are uninsulated) behave electrically as a solid conductor because current can flow between adjacent wires just as it can flow between adjacent finite elements in a solid wire - which is the cause of the skin effect. At higher frequencies, increasingly strong electromagnetic fields are generated by eddy currents which increase electrical resistance in the center of the wire or multistrand conductive cable. The exception is Litz cable which uses insulated wire bundles allowing AC to flow on the outermost conductive surface of multiple wires at once.
The reason the higher strand (thousand plus) cables have a higher ampacity has nothing to do with the skin effect and everything to do with more efficient heat dissipation.
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