CTE of Typical Materials

The table shows some common materials, and their response to temperature change. These are average numbers for the CTE, as we shall see later there are many different materials going by these names, with different values for the CTE.

The last column is meant to give you a rough "ballpark" estimate of the importance of the temperature in measurements. A length measurement with an uncertainty of 1 ppm (1 microinch/inch) is a very high accuracy measurement. For steel, if I do not know the temperature of the part better than 0.09 °C (0.16 °F) the uncertainty of my measurement is uncertain by 1 ppm just from the temperature uncertainty. For aluminum, the problem is twice as bad. For fused quartz the temperature does not matter much.

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Date Created: Monday, October 15, 2001
Last Updated: Tuesday, November 09, 2004