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FSU Sets 7 World Records In High Magnetics Research

Posted by timothy on from the research-and-fun dept.

spence calder writes "FSU's High Magnetic Field Lab, more specifically my Kenpo teacher, just broke 7 world records, and brought the record for a superconducting magnet to 25 Tesla. Check it out at FSView and a more detailed article here. Now if only our football team was that cool." And if you'd like your magnetic toys to shoot metal bits, Jason Rollette points to his railgun project, which looks like good, clean, high-voltage fun.

3 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is there any breakthrough here? by hbackert · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It is a bit more tricky than just 'add more coils' or 'use more current'.

    Back at university we had a 14T He cooled magnet. Reaching 12T was standard. No issues. But having 2 more Teslas out of that thing took many tricks: pumping off the Helium to make it even colder, increasing current near the limit. The thick copper cables got pretty warm. And heat and superconducting coils and Helium don't mix well, so for us, 15T was unreachable.

    It's not unsimilar to the 10s/100m in athletics: Everyone get's close, but it took some time until someone finally was faster than 10s.

    20T was the limit for 'usual' magnets. Getting more needed a new trick. But I admit that for people not using this stuff, it looks very much like no particular breakthrough. Like I never cared if I can run 100m in 10.1 or 9.9s. It's just 2% difference after all, isn't it?

  2. Silly question from the ignorant by questamor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just curiously, if these fields are being generated as 500,000 times stronger than tha earth's own... are they detectable from space?

  3. Energy storage/regulation applications.. by adeyadey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Perhaps, after the recent power outages in the US, the most important application of supercoducting magnets could be power storage. There seem to be 2 ways they are used - either to make friction-free magnetic bearings for traditional flywheel systems, or (more interesting) direct short-term storage of power. For situations where you need to temporarily store a *lot* of power this is an interesting technology alternative to batteries/hydro/etc.. Current devices seem to cover mainly very short term variations, but what about covering longer term regulation (hours/days) of variable power from a wind-farm, or solar, for example?

    Anyone got more gen on this?

    Try Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) Systems

    This link describes a commercial device that stores 3 megawatt-seconds..

    --
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