Q&A: Adding a wire to the materials

Most of these “special elite competition professional gaming wires” are just the standard alloys which have been rebranded and quadrupled in price.

Knowing what’s in them is always an advantage, because it not only allows you to make informed decisions about what you want to vape on, it also lets you choose the right material for your calculations.

Vapers are always finding new and exciting metals and alloys to make coils from, and naturally they’re asking me to add them to Steam Engine, often without providing sufficient data. Unfortunately, I can seldom solve this problem by browsing web shops, because the web shops usually don’t provide enough data either. And even when they do, how much can their numbers be trusted?

Required specs

The specs that are needed to add a new wire to the Steam Engine calculators, are as follows:

• The name, composition and manufacturer of the wire.
• The resistivity in Ohms-square-millimeter per meter (Ω mm²/m).
• Specific heat (heat capacity) in Joules per gram-Kelvin (J/gK).
• Density in grams per cubic centimeter (g/cm³).
• And if you want temperature control, either a TCR value, or a list of factors for different temperatures (the more the merrier)

Submitting your wire of choice for inclusion in Steam Engine:

The density and specific heat values are not essential to most of the calculations, so they can be approximated without breaking everything, but the resistivity absolutely needs to be bang on. When using temperature control, the TCR/TFR values also need to be precise.

If you want to submit a new material for inclusion in Steam Engine, please link to a proper datasheet. Sales blurbs from online vape shops are usually ambiguous, inaccurate and untrustworthy. If I have to convert some Ω/m number into Ω mm²/m, that is another source of error that should be avoided.

If your source of vaping wire is unable or unwilling to give you the proper specs for the wire that they sell you, maybe you should consider switching to another provider.

If you are unable to give me a reliable source for your numbers (the resistivity in particular), then I’m afraid I won’t be able to add the wire to Steam Engine. The quality of the calculations is dependent on the quality of the data. It just feels wrong to potentially degrade the quality of the calculators by making them operate on assumptions.

Requests for specific wires

Hello, please add the “Anarchist competition wire” cable on your data base. Best regards.

If Google serves me right, this is Nichrome N80, so try that.

Gplat

Depending on the “model” of wire, you can either use the SS 316L (Elite) or SS 317L (Haywire) option, already in the list

Nichrome N90

What is Nichrome N90, and where can I find a datasheet? I understand that there are a lot of vape shops that sell wires under the name Nichrome 90 or N90, but it seems like a mystery material to me. Is it the same as Chromel? Is it “pure nickel”, only less pure than Ni200? Is it (gasp) N80 being marketed with a bigger number? I don’t know. Does anyone know? Needless to say, I can’t add the material if I don’t know what it is.

Various NiFe variants

I’ll try to add some more of these as I find reliable data on them, but keep in mind that there are loads of NiFe variants out there. If I find one in a vaping context, it is usually lacking proper data, and if I find one with a datasheet, I typically don’t know if anyone is even vaping on it, or under which trade name it’s being sold.