Skin Effect - Skin Effect Reduction of The Self Inductance of A Conductor

Skin Effect Reduction of The Self Inductance of A Conductor

Refer to the diagram below showing the inner and outer conductors of a coaxial cable. Since the skin effect causes a current at high frequencies to flow mainly at the surface of a conductor, it can be seen that this will reduce the magnetic field inside the wire, that is, beneath the depth at which the bulk of the current flows. It can be shown that this will have a minor effect on the self inductance of the wire itself; see Skilling or Hayt for a mathematical treatment of this phenomenon.

Note that the inductance considered in this context refers to a bare conductor, not the inductance of a coil used as a circuit element. The inductance of a coil is dominated by the mutual inductance between the turns of the coil which increases its inductance according to the square of the number of turns. However when only a single wire is involved, then in addition to the "external inductance" involving magnetic fields outside of the wire (due to the total current in the wire) as seen in the white region of the figure below, there is also a much smaller component of "internal inductance" due to the magnetic field inside the wire itself, the green region in figure B. In a single wire the internal inductance becomes of little significance when the wire is much much longer than its diameter. The presence of a second conductor in the case of a transmission line requires a different treatment as is discussed below.

Due to the skin effect, at high frequencies the internal inductance of a wire vanishes, as can be seen in the case of a telephone twisted pair, below. In normal cases the effect of internal inductance is ignored in the design of coils or calculating the properties of microstrips.