https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=superconducting+tape&iax=im...
Aren’t the LHC magnets niobium-titanium? Those aren’t high temperature superconductors. Though it is indeed a metal under any definition. The rule of thumb is that high-temperature superconductors can be cooled by liquid nitrogen alone. This is not the case of the LHC magnets, which also have a liquid helium cooling loop.
> They're metallic, so you can form them into the shape you need without having to manufacture it in that shape to begin with, since you'd need another superconductor to join pieces like glue, which we don't have.
The term “metallic” is unhelpful because often in material science it just means an electronic conductor (a material with a non-zero density of states at the Fermi level). Under that definition, some ceramics are metallic, and the opposite of “metallic” is “insulator”, or sometimes “semi-conductor”.
YBCO, which is probably the most used high-temperature superconductor, is an oxyde, so a ceramic, but still an electronic (super)conductor, so metallic. The fact that it’s an oxyde does not prevent its use, notably in spherical tokamaks.
So I don’t know the person you’re referencing but their background work on the subject seems less than adequate, from what you say.
They're saying that LHC does not use a ceramic, and therefore high-temperature, superconductor; instead they use metallic (cooled) superconductors because they can be molded.
There are lots of reasons to use more classical superconductors in the LHC, just as in ITER. Some are design and engineering issues, as you mention. Another one is that the tapes we use for YBCO were not a practical thing when the LHC was designed. But now they are (though they haven’t been used in such a large scale) and you can bet that they’ll jump at any opportunity to get rid of the helium loop and take advantage of the stronger magnetic fields you can get with YBCO.
Well, nobody mentioned cermets, or wires, and there are plenty of applications for superconductors beyond wires. Even so, we are perfectly able to make fibre optics cables with silica, which is a ceramic.
> we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through.
Malleability (actually, ductility) has nothing to do with electric conductivity. It can be useful depending on the use case, but for example on a printed circuit you don’t care about that. Not everything is a dangling wire.
YBCO a ceramic superconductor, it is used in thin films that are deposited on metallic substrates in tapes and it works well. See figure 2 of the paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271637455_Dipole_Ma... .
Also, you might not realise this but pretty much nothing is malleable at liquid helium temperature.
> Pottery ceramic wont work like that.
Sigh. Ceramics are not pottery, and more than 99% of the time do not have anything to do with pottery. Ceramics are compounds that are not intermetallic, typically oxides, sulphides, nitrides, etc. Some are bendy (though generally less than metallic alloys), some are hard, some are electric conductors, some are not. They have very diverse sets of properties.
They are everywhere in the chips on the device you use, in its display, in the power plants that make electrons move so you can use it, in any lithium-ion battery, etc. I don’t think I can name one device that does not involve ceramics. Even a shovel, either in the form of a passive layer that makes it stainless, or in the form of rust on it. None of that has anything to do with pottery.
Yes, but the minimal bending radius would be far from impressive.
> Thats the point. we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through.
So many assumptions here. Copper wire is but one form that is useful for energy transport. But superconductors don't need a lot of thickness and parallel layers of tape have enough flex in one dimension to be very useful. Usually they allow for complex routing by adding twists, like flatcable, but given the magnetic fields involved you don't want to do that in free space but firmly tied down to something (preferably something non-magnetic!).
> Pottery ceramic wont work like that.
Ceramics are a vast class of materials, which includes pottery ceramics but also many others which have a very large range and diversity of properties. They are essentially a whole branch on the tree of materials science that range from Tungsten Carbide to diamond to ordinary clay and a whole raft of others.
"In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones. [...] The ones [the superconductors] that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren't [high temperature superconductors]."
It just has a sentence in the middle of it that confuses you into thinking their antecedents are "the HTSCs" and "ceramic" instead of "the SCs" and "HTSCs".
Probably not. Being crystalline and being a ceramic are completely unrelated. Standard superconductors like niobium-tin and niobium-titanium are crystalline metals (intermetallic alloys). The vast majority of metals are crystalline, to the point that when a company tried to make a metallic glass a couple of years ago (under the name Liquid Metal), it made quite a bit of noise.
The liquid helium cooled niobium-titanium can make strong field and is easy to produce. The RBCOs superconductors, YBCO is the main one, are liquid nitrogen cooled and make even higher magnetic fields. It sounds like it took a while to figure out how make them in bulk.
YBCO superconductors are going to be revolution but will take time for the older systems to disappear. Good example is ITER, which was designed for liquid helium magnets cause nothing else was practical at the time. The SPARC tokamak from MIT uses YBCO magnets which means it can be smaller, higher field, and cheaper cooling.
Ceramic "high-temp" ones are not used because they still operate at very low temperatures so you are not completely free of cooling requirements, they are just slightly lower.
In that case it may make sense to use superconductor with better material properties in exchange for more cooling.
A room temperature ambient pressure superconductor would remove the need for special cooling so it would be vastly better than current "high" temperature ones.
The problem is that this is not true anymore. It was true when I was in high school. Modern methods of manufacturing cuprate superconductors have been applied to the largest-scale projects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Projec...
https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000075557/4402937
https://indico.cern.ch/event/775529/contributions/3309887/at...