Hacker News Reader

Comment by esalman | Hacker News Reader

Think your EV is so efficient that you only need to charge it once every 5000 miles.

How does a superconductor help with that? Lithium ion is already 95-99% efficient, same with motors. It would help with the charging cable, but that's not increasing the battery capacity. Off the top of my head the main advantage here seems to be MRIs, maybe also maglev trains, maybe generators? It really depends on the form factor of this superconductor compared to copper wire.

Zero loss of energy to heat in any of the conductors. You're not making the battery more efficient, you're making everything else more efficient.

That's not going to produce a 20x gain in efficiency. The primary problem with electric cars is energy density in the battery itself.

Maybe if mag-lev cars are possible, you could get that kind of gain from the reduced friction.

If your loss goes from 5% to 1%, you have to deal with 80% less heat. So you can make 3x smaller motors. All the powertrain of these machines will be hugely simplified.

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.

Are most of the losses in the motor? I figure it'd be friction in the drive train, the bearings, air drag, etc.

The motors are not a constraint though for electrical vehicles. The motors are already much smaller than equivalent ICEs, as seen in the empty "frunks" in most electric cars.

Agreed Fusion would be the biggest win possible.

There is also SMES, energy storage application, already in use today that may become interesting for other use cases if we could do it without the cooling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...

The problem with losing 5% of the energy in the motor windings is that they heat up. With superconducting windings you run smaller-lighter motors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com