Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Create Room Temperature Superconductor
StarEmperor writes "A team of Canadian and German scientists have fabricated a room-temperature superconductor, using a highly compressed silicon-hydrogen compound. According to the article,"The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that work at room temperature.""
So, how exactly is this a good alternative to colder superconductors? Pressure is often more expensive to safely maintain. Not to mention the fact that SiH4 autoignites at room temperature.
NOPE. Do not pass Go Do not collect $200.
"Instead of super-cooling the material, as is necessary for conventional superconductors, the new material is instead super-compressed. The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that work at room temperature."
Rats. Though at least hypothetically, it seems like it would be easier to design a containment for a high-pressure superconductor that requires minimal energy to maintain versus a low-pressure one. You can design a pressure vessel such that the pressure only escapes via small known locations (any valve or seal), whereas cold always escapes in all directions. So there still may be practical advantages to this discovery.
Though in any event characterizing the behavior of high-pressure materials is valuable.
The enemies of Democracy are
It boils at 161 K at atmospheric pressure. Increasing the pressure increases the temperature at which the material vaporizes.
chillax137
I'm holding TFA (Science, 14 March 2008, pp. 1506-1509). The highest critical temperatures they observed, regardless of pressure, were around 17 Kelvin (between 96-120 GPa). These are interesting results because they are among the few measurements available to shed light on the behavior of dense hydrides at these pressures, and these materials might, if better understood, one day allow a room temperature superconductor to be made. This, however, is not it.
MagLev.
The biggest issue right now in most maglev is the energy required to cool the wires in the tracks.
Oh how good life would be if we only needed to reach fairbanks temperatures for superconductivity.
(Current best is a little worse than -300F, and fairbanks is not quite so cold, with a record of -66F).
So if they invented a room temperature superconductor, the world would in fact be quite thrilled at such a major breakthrough.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I think we probably have enough silicon. It is about 25% of the earth's crust by mass.
Silane explodes with considerable violence on exposure to air.
The best part? It's only *mostly* pyrophoric in air. *Sometimes* it waits a little while and accumulates a nice big cloud first, rather than flaring the instant it starts leaking.
Not to mention the fact that SiH4 autoignites at room temperature.
Also: I hear silanes (beyond n=1) are VERY toxic.
Back in my undergraduate days my chemistry teaching fellow was doing research on them. He claimed that the ones he was working on were so toxic that if you could smell them you had already exceeded the fatal dose.
(Now he might have been feeding me and the rest of the class a line of bull. But I wasn't about to argue with him. It WAS his thesis project, which implies that he should know what he was talking about. And he DID grade the class, after all... B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Superconductivity is not only useful for power distribution. It can also be used for energy storage and high strength magnetic fields. There still may be a fair few practical uses for a high pressure superconductor.
Cold is not a thing, it is the absence of something (heat). Heat, on the other hand, exists, and enters from all directions.
"Silicon makes up 25.7% of the earth's crust by weight, and is the second most abundant element, exceeded only by oxygen. It is found largely as silicon oxides such as sand (silica), quartz, rock crystal, amethyst, agate, flint, jasper and opal. Silicon is found also in minerals such as asbestos, feldspar, clay and mica."
http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/Si/key.html
High voltage is already 'transmitted' in pressurized bus work. The bus work is pressurized with SF6 gas and is regularly used with voltages up to 500kV. This is common in Transformer Stations and other high voltage equipment (breakers, etc). You can come within 3' of a 500kV bus that's pressurized in SF6 (you can theoretically touch the outside of the bus work too, but I wouldn't). Unfortunately it's not economically feasible to do this over long distances. SF6 in itself is not toxic to humans, although it has a nasty habit of displacing all the oxygen in your vicinity. The by-products created when electrical arc occur within the SF6 gas are extremely toxic.
Actually, it is quite hard to cool things in space, if they generate any kind of heat. You can only radiate heat away - conduction and convection won't help you.
Call me when they actually have something that superconducts at room temperature. The article was very vague about what they actually did, and had a lot of phrases like "perhaps without a refrigerant", and "potential superconducting materials for industrial applications". I'd like to know more about the "experimental confirmation" briefly mentioned in the article. Sounds to me like it's mostly theory that was over-hyped by an author who doesn't know what he's writing about.
Zienth
- Make a wire of the material.
- Clad material with a metal coating at high temperature.
- Wait for the cladding to contract as it cools.
It's like the old metal shop trick where you get a red-hot brass washer that barely fits on a dry-ice cold steel rod and put them together.Heat is not a thing. Thermal Energy, on the other hand, exists, and dissipates in all directions. (Heat is defined as the dissipation of thermal energy)
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
If there's a cold wind whistling in through the open door, then certainly cold is coming in.
Since convection is one of the three heat transfer mechanisms, then movement of cold mass and subsequent dilution with a warmer mass, viz. cold coming in, is a valid description of heat transfer.
Fraid not. Turns out the researchers didn't actually get to room temperature.
http://store.mozilla.org/product.php?code=14%2093119&catid=search
The more is that the researchers have shown that silane turns into a metal at very high pressures; while researchers have not managed to create metallic hydrogen, they have managed this. The less is that it's only a 17-degree Kelvin superconductor--not an extraordinary temperature--and the pressures involved are on the order of half a million atmospheres.
The original article was published in Science on 14 March 2008; Vol. 319. no. 5869, pp. 1506 - 1509; DOI: 10.1126/science.1153282. Your local library can probably get you a copy; if you are at a university you may be able to access the online version.
400 GPa
The story I read said 50GPa. Which is around 7-8 MILLION PSI. We're talking a whole boatload of pressure here. 50GPa is the minimum, the superconductivity is maintained at higher temperatures at around 120GPa (or 20 million psi).
But if it does go wrong, things could be bad. Superconductors are laready prone to explosive failure if a superconductor suddenly ceasews to superconduct. If that is inside a very high pressure vessel, the available energy from a destructive malfunction is frightening : Mega-amps of electicity and giga-pascals of pressure suddenly being unleashed in the wrong place.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
So even with superconducting transmission lines, you still have the incentive to up the voltage as much as possible to increase the power carrying capability of a single line.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.