I still have a very, very hard time understanding what all of this means. Is there an easy to understand explanation for a room temperature superconductor?
i.e. - It has zero resistance to electricity.
Currently, the best superconducting materials we can create have to be chilled to near absolute zero, which means designing them to work in liquid helium baths. This is expensive, and difficult. If a material can superconduct at room temperature, now we're talking usage in general purpose consumer goods.
As for why we want a superconductor? Real cool stuff happens when there's zero resistance to electrical current. I'm sure other people can add on to this, but for an immediate benefit - electricity transmission wouldn't have any losses. Imagine offshore wind turbines that could transmit power to Kansas from the Atlantic. It'd be a big deal.
I think there are other use cases within devices themselves that are far more interesting for energy storage.
The same cable diameter can now power an entire state.
(I think there were some comments going around that this material has quite a low critical field, so there would have to be some substantial improvements on this even if it is superconducting)
The benefit might lie less in the wires and more in the equipment.
Tough to say with a trans Atlantic cable though. Those kinds of distances have never been tried to my knowledge.
The electrical resistance per se is actually not that interesting. Certainly not for energy loss. Electronics would benefit, especially CPUs if transistor switching doesn't heat the interconnects above the transition T (the actual cpu is much hotter than the package where the thermocouple is).
High quality (as in high Q) passives would be cool. Think very good capacitors and inductors for filtering. Super cond. caps wouldn't be great for energy dumping since high B fields kill the superconducting effect.
The magnetic properties are more interesting. MRIs w/out crygenic cooling, mag levitation without stabilization.
Apparently there are quantum applications too, but Im not too sure about those but my physicist friend is super excited (in a bad way) for quantum computers now.
If this pans out we're looking at an unexpected revolution.
I'm imagining a future where a superconducting layer on a PCB is just another checkbox you can choose when ordering small runs of boards.
[ ] 1 oz copper
[ ] 2 oz copper (+$2)
[X] 10 micron LK-99 (+$10)
Another thought - I think the first place we'll see this widely rolled out is in IC's (waiting for the Asianometry video on it). IC's are already planar, they're small so exotic materials aren't a big contributor to costs, and they're very power dense. Replacing a metal layer with a superconducting one could enable greater gate density and potentially significant improvements in efficiency. I don't know by how much because switching losses are probably where most energy is dissipated, but it's an incremental change that seems compatible with the process.
Perhaps it will be like a "tape" laid down with the proper orientation for each conductor. Perhaps you'll need separate north-south and east-west and maybe diagonal layers with special attention to inter-layer connections.
(The EE I worked with later didn't believe me. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Persist... and note that the loss was due to details of magnetic superconductors, not superconductors in general)
> Experiments have demonstrated that currents in superconducting coils can persist for years without any measurable degradation. Experimental evidence points to a lifetime of at least 100,000 years. Theoretical estimates for the lifetime of a persistent current can exceed the estimated lifetime of the universe, depending on the wire geometry and the temperature. In practice, currents injected in superconducting coils have persisted for more than 27 years (as of August 2022) in superconducting gravimeters.
Thanks to everyone. I understand this much better.
You still have to worry about batteries. Unless if you place equal numbers of panels separated by 120° meridians for example.
And then there is coordination between governments. This is probably where such an initiative might fail.
I keep hearing mixed things about superconductors being useful for energy storage.
Secondly, superconductors are one of the most promising platforms for qubits. Big boost for quantum computing - and these are just two applications off the top off my head.
""" Although the attainable magnetic flux density limits the energy per unit volume given by Equation (1) ( B2 /2μ o), the real limit of the energy stored in a SMES is mechanical. [...] The relation defines the minimum mass of the mechanical structure in pure tension to support the radial electromagnetic forces. Force-balanced coils [5] minimize the working stress and thus the mass of the structure. """
So it looks like they 1) don't look at cryo and 2) the limiting factor is the stress due to EM fields.
[0] https://snf.ieeecsc.org/sites/ieeecsc.org/files/CR5_Final3_0...
Magnetic fields moving through conductors induce electrical energy in the conductors. Normally this is quickly dissipated as heat, but in a superconductor this energy can't go anywhere, and the conductor therefore can't move through the magnetic field.
We've already done a lot of experiments with superconductors, since we've found some that work at extreme cold, but room temperature superconductors would allow us to productive some of those cool ideas by making them economically viable.
This isn't really accurate because increasing the resistance of a resistor in a given circuit will actually decrease the amount of heat dissipated.
W = IV where I = V/R plug that in we get W = (V/R)V = V^2/R
So Watts = Volts^2/Resistance. Increase resistance, decrease watts.
Its better to just say that resistance converts voltage to heat, and leave it at that. Also is why in the orginal paper (and other superconductor work) they measure voltage drop across the conductor. No voltage drop(loss) = no resistance.
I presented it as an intuitive "feel" based idea of what a resistor does. It's very much not a numerically useful or physically accurate one.
To circumvent this, physicists discovered superconductivity: a state in which a material is a perfectly efficient conductor of electricity. Thus far, to create a superconductive material requires keeping that material at extreme conditions of temperature and pressure.
A room-temperature superconductor is a game-changer because we could get nearly-perfect energy efficient electric conduction without the additional energy overhead it takes to keep the material at such a dense pressure or extreme temperature. Such a material would have wide applications across a variety of disciplines.
Here's a useful article as well: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-2048/26/11/1...
We lose it to HEAT and that has a lot of limitations like the stuff melting and exploding.
Now imagine one where you don't have to chill it with liquid nitrogen.
It will be fun to see trains levitating over the ground without any friction loss from the wheels at high speed.
Weekly Science news by Sabine Hossenfelder
Today we’ll talk about the new superconductor claim, bad news for new physics, a quantum radar, how to print origami, space-based solar power for a moon station, a dire prediction for the collapse of an ocean circulation, Europe’s first hyperloop test, why NASA shoots lasers at the rain forest, and of course, the telephone will ring.
There are also some really cool levitation effects, demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPqEEZa2Gis
As to why this one works at room temp? It really needs quantum physics to explain.
We can make superconductors, but they only work at extremely cold temperatures, if they get too hot they turn back into bad conductors. This new material might be able to superconduct at room temperature, which means zero loss conductors without expensive bulky and complicated cooling systems. There are many cool things that can be done with zero loss conductors.
- Cheaper electricity transportation
- New kind of batteries
- Consumer devices that don't heat up as you use them
- Simplifies the design of fusion reactors, which means we could have fusion sooner and cheaper
- Probably lots of things we can't even think of
If this is true, then you still have a lot of time before you can do industrial replication but given the stakes I imagine we will see immense inflows of capital into this.
And now I’m imagining a superconducting toaster. Such frustration!
Electromagnets are built with coils of copper magnet wire - an efficient conductor but generates waste heat - what if we could build those electromagnets with zero resistance? Electric motors become very exciting. The electrical <-> mechanical relationship gets transformed.
We use electricity for everything, so it's hard to communicate the extent of the revolution. People keep bringing up MRI machines because they're on the ragged edge of electromagnet usage constrained by cooling.
Aren't there other components like transistors that will still generate heat?
Maybe if mag-lev cars are possible, you could get that kind of gain from the reduced friction.
That's no small deal, but in the grand scheme of things that a hot superconductor can give us.. I mean, this can (possibly, with decades of research) give us fusion, quantum computing, etc.
Agreed Fusion would be the biggest win possible.