What copper-clad steel is: a material family, not one process
Copper-clad steel selection guide, part 1 of 8
One material carries five names in the standards that are routinely cited together on an international project: IEEE 80 and ASTM say copper-clad steel; UL 467 says copper-coated; IEC 62561-2 says copper coated steel and defines it by process; IEC 62561-7 says copper-plated steel; China's national code GB/T 50065-2011 translated the IEEE term as "copper-plated steel". The consequences are not academic: a process-based definition can push a thick-layer continuous-cast product into the galvanized-steel acceptance limits of another clause, and a historical translation can be read backwards to infer a manufacturing process.
copper-clad steel (CCS): a composite earthing material consisting of a steel core and a bonded outer copper layer. The name includes products whose copper layer is formed by electrodeposition (copper-plated), by cast bonding (including continuous casting), and by pressure bonding (including hot-roll bonding).
Note – Manufacturing process, product construction (solid, rod, tape, strand), final mechanical state (annealed or not) and design parameters are declared separately. Membership of the CCS family does not by itself establish suitability for an application, nor authorise use of tabulated material constants.
Minimum local copper thickness: the smallest radial copper thickness at any point on the finished conductor; for strand, on any single wire.
This is not our invention; it writes down what IEEE 80 already does. Clause 11.3.1 calculates the thermal capacity and resistivity of CCS from the areas, densities, specific heats and resistivities of the two metals – the bonding process never enters the equations – and a footnote to Table 1 calls a 0.25 mm copper-coated rod "clad". ASTM B227 / B910 classify by conductivity grade and temper; UL 467 accepts rods by copper thickness at any point without naming a process; China's Q/GDW 10466-2021 uses CCS as the family name with EP (electroplated) / CC (continuous cast) process codes. "Family name plus separately declared parameters" has been running in several standards systems for years.
DL/T 1312-2023, cited throughout this guide, is the Chinese electric-power industry standard Requirements for copper-clad steel in power engineering grounding, issued by the National Energy Administration – a product standard written specifically for CCS earthing conductor, covering every horizontal and vertical form and qualifying it under power-frequency fault current and a 500-hour salt-spray sequence. An item-by-item comparison with UL 467 (rods only) and IEC 62561-2 (lightning-protection components) is on the Test evidence page.
What it means for selection: compare two CCS products on the four separately declared parameters – process, construction, temper, minimum local copper thickness – not on the name. Each of the following sections deals with one of them.
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