> Batteries that don't take any time to recharge
Huh? Is this actually a thing that this enables? I don't initially see how
Huh? Is this actually a thing that this enables? I don't initially see how
We won't see lossless transmission in a very long time, and no place where an aluminum cable is too expensive today will become viable because something a million times more expensive is 9% more efficient.
Batteries won't see a revolution because of this, there's simply no reason for them to (but they are currently in a revolution, and there are more to come). AC storage in the superconductor will probably be the most expensive storage mechanism you can buy, and flywheels will keep having atrocious energy density, they won't even get twice as good. But it will completely revolutionize some niches in storage.
This won't replace metal layers in CPU for a really long time. Superconductors are hard enough to make, CPUs are absurdly hard to make, and the wins on power savings aren't very large. If people make superconducting chips, it will be ones where the superconductors do active switching, what is much farther away and can enable much faster CPUs too.
I really wish people would stop repeating those. If you are going out of your way for an outlandish claim, I'm much more interested on discussing if this can replace rockets for near Earth space travel than those absurd costly low gain things.
The idea that reducing power consumption is also not large enough to matter is...yeah, detached from reality. Thermal density has been an enormous problem with increasing CPU feature densities. CPUs already run hotter then a kitchen hot-plate, which is why so much effort has been put into dynamic throttling and other tricks - you straight up can't run CPU circuit elements full-power for very long without the risk of frying them, or requiring a cooling system which is impractical for widespread deployment.
I would've thought the main wins would've been reduced heat generation. Like you said, power savings would be negligible. But at the data center scale I'd imagine that reduced heat would result in reduced air conditioning power costs. And potentially with thermal constraints removed, it would allow for more compact packaging per server as well.
Like you said though, I doubt it would happen any time soon.
Most of the heat in a data center is coming from power burned in the devices themselves not the power transmission to those devices.
Sort of like how a space heater is hot at the heater portion, not the power cable going into the heater.
You aren't losing more than a W or so to transmission for every kW of power delivered. (in fact, you are generating more heat from the AC->DC transformation)
Typically, power cords and wiring is 15 AWG, which has a 10 milli-ohm/meter resistance and runs as 120V AC (maximum of 15->20A). So, 1000m of power cord running at full load would result in 150->200W of heat from the power cable. Meanwhile the server is generating 1.6->2.2kW of heat. (Assuming a single very long 1kM route is servicing the server).
Cut the cabling distance to a couple of meters and you can see why nobody worries at power consumption at that point.
The reason they don't is because yeild is the one most important variable on the entire process. And silver adds enough complexity to decrease it. (A few chips do have silver layers. People manage to use them when the process is mature enough and the added complexity gets tamed. Including something like YBCO into a high-performance chips manufacturing process is a half-a-century project; LK-99 can't even be reliably done yet.)
Lanarkite and copper phosphide aren't expensive, other than the government controls on red phosphorous (because it can be used to make meth).
It is exciting stuff but there is a very long way to go if true.
Another way to say it is that, with a superconducting wire, you can make the wire as thin as you want and still pass the same amount of current through it, without melting the wire. Picture using a USB-C cable to charge your car.
† (There'd still be a current limit due to the heat generated by the chemical reaction that rebuilds the battery's voltage potential... if said reaction is exothermic. Some battery chemistries are endothermic when charging!)
But a big bank of batteries, like are in an EV? Very hard to give them enough current to heat them up. Most of the "heat problem" is from the bottlenecked current path into the car; once you fan out across all the individual cells, each individual cell isn't receiving much current.
And a bank of supercapacitors? You could charge it effectively instantly.
I keep hearing battery tech is getting good, and the research I've seen suggests that more storage on the grid would improve efficiency by a lot, so I don't know if it would even pose a particular challenge if that sort of demand arose.. but overall utilization isn't really the limiting reagent.
If my math is correct, then for a basic 500mA USB device, that would mean a cable a bit over 3 cm^2 in cross-sectional area, or about 2 cm across (for each of the power and ground leads, at least).
Alternately, a cable of just over 1/2cm in diameter (for power and ground, each) could charge a rechargable Ni-MH AA battery in about 12 hours and 40 minutes.
Tl;DR this is absolutely revolutionary science, if true, but we're definitely Not There Yet.
In fact, the tight tolerances of this seem to indicate the opposite.
I have no knowledge in this area though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_superconductivity#/...
Usually this is an optimization frontier, where something that has tetchy critical current/field at high temperature is going to have very good critical current/field at the same temperature as a lower-Tc superconductor.
If it superconducts at all at room temp, cooling it down even to 200K (about dry ice temp - quite cheap to do) could get you something very usable.
No, superconductors have a specific current above which they stop superconducting so you will want to stay away from that limit. This particular superconductor has been presented with a very low Ic (150 mA in the original paper0 which would not make it particularly useful in such applications but future iterations (assuming it is all true) may improve on that (they should otherwise we have the equivalent of a superconducting straw).
On another note: a superconductor that can only do 150 mA / cm^2 seems intuitively strange, as though that figure is somehow off, it's a gigantic cross section for such a small current. It is very well possible that this is somehow an error in the reporting or an actual measurement on a thin sample with small cross section. So there are many explanations possible and only one of those is a true limit of the material.
So it could be the whole sample, or it could one micron-sized link of grains of whatever the "real" material is running through the sample.
That has been the hypothesis from day #1.
Thick cable, high voltage (900V typically) and everything is fairly manageable. Assuming we could consistently charge at that 350kW we could fully (0->100%) charge an 80kWh ev battery in 13 minutes. That's not slow.
The limiting factor is the battery chemistry, not the wire chemistry.
There are limits how much you can pump into it, it isn’t magic… but it almost is actually.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...