Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

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The first and easiest application would be "high Q" radio-frequency components such as antennas. I asked a similar question a few years ago a bunch of electrical engineers were basically salivating at the possibility.

The next one would be as thin films to replace copper or aluminium power delivery wires in silicon chips. This would make them run significantly cooler. While copper is a good conductor, very thin copper wires transferring multiple amps(!) is a recipe for a space heater. Even a superconductor that cost $1K per gram would be worthwhile in this application, let alone $1K per kilogram!

Next up would likely be electrical motors. Higher magnetic field strengths and lower heating losses would allow some really tiny but crazy powerful motors.

A lot would depend on the critical current and critical field that such hypothetical superconductor could have. If it's too low, its usage where large currents are needed, like motors or chips will be small. As example, look into the generation of high magnetic field. In a typical physics lab or MRI machine, the current state of the art is by superconducting coils, but for very large magnetic fields (several tens of teslas) you need to fallback on copper, since there are not known practical superconductor able to sustain such fields without losing their superconductivity

>there are not known practical superconductor able to sustain such fields without losing their superconductivity

I don't think this is still correct. Mass production of REBCO has ramped up in the past few years which is capable of 250 T internal fields and is being sold on tapes with 100,000+ A/cm^2. We're currently at the "hundreds of miles of tape per year" stage.

I think we have to be approaching the "thousands of miles per year" stage. The TF magnet demoed at CFS/MIT had 166 miles of tape and "contained close to 10% of the world’s supply of commercially available HTS" at the time. SPARC will have 18 of those magnets.

While HTS magnets may be "state of the art" they are still substantially more expensive than LTS magnets and it will be a few years before they start showing up in MRI machines.

https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc/hts-magnet

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