Scientists Create New Type of Superconductor Wires

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists in Israel have used technology created at a U.S.-funded national research lab to created a new kind of wire spun from sapphire crystals, that is a vastly better conductor than traditional copper wires. The research could have profound implications for renewable energy since much of the generation is in remote locations. It could help bring more electricity from renewable sources to cities."

Comments

If it's not cancer, it's renewable energy

[ColdWetDog]

So, this stuff won't cure cancer, but it might help with renewable energy:

Among the many other possible beneficiaries of the team's new creation that comes to mind would be the hyper-ambitious international DESERTEC organization, which seeks to harvest massive amounts of solar energy in deserts and transmit it to population centers, for example from Africa to Europe.

Except for the small detail that it has to be cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature to act as superconductor and an entire desert transmission line sitting in LN would take a bunch of energy, what's not to like?

Re:If it's not cancer, it's renewable energy

[Anonymous Coward]

> as the wires get longer the transmission losses increase

It's superconducting wire; the point is that there's no transmission loss.

However, as the length increases, the coolant loss will increase. But even that isn't as bad as it sounds. After all, since the wire is superconducting, the wire itself isn't adding heat to the coolant - it's only the outside that is heating the coolant. So heavily insulated underground wiring would actually work pretty well. And if liquid nitrogen conducts heat well enough, you don't even need active cooling systems at many points (cool one end, and the heat redistributes). I suspect most of the energy spent on cooling is going to spent on the initial cooling - filling that entire pipe with liquid nitrogen before even turning the power on - after which it's much less to maintain it. Also, if the source is cheap and/or renewable (fission/wind/solar/hydro/wave and someday fusion), even 'expensive' cooling may still be worth it. Also also, you don't have to do every line in the world for it to be useful - even doing just the first few miles of heavy line right at the source would be beneficial.

Re:If it's not cancer, it's renewable energy

[chriso11]

I've heard that superconductors not only have no electrical resistance, but the have no thermal resistance too. That would mean superconductors have a constant temperature across them; is this true?

Re:If it's not cancer, it's renewable energy

[blargfellow]

Superconductors have a finite thermal conductivity, so there are temperature gradients. The substrate material (in this case sapphire) is actually responsible for most of the local heat dissipation in high temperature superconducting wires.

Re:Not Superconductivity?

[bassman998]

It's actually superconducting. From the article:

The TAU research team took the project a step farther by combining the fibers with a self-contained cooling system based on liquid nitrogen, which keeps the sapphire wire in a highly efficient superconducting state without overheating.

BETTER ARTICLE

[Dthief]

better article: http://www.sciencenewsline.com/technology/2011090708160001.html

Actually, these seem to be sapphire wires...

[PaulBu]

... covered with High-Tc superconductor film, epitaxially grown. So yes, it would work.

Much better info about this R&D for /. crowd : http://www.rdmag.com/RD100-Awards-Rounding-The-Edges-On-Superconductor-Wires/

Paul B.

Re:Not Superconductivity?

[reverseengineer]

I looked into this, and apparently this invention is not about the sapphire itself being superconductive or even conductive- things might be different with the right doping, but ordinarily, a sapphire crystal is a very good electrical resistor. This is about using a precisely crafted sapphire thread as a support for laying down a high temperature superconductor. Known high temperature superconductors, being ceramics, are difficult to make into practical wires, something that has limited their use (for most applications that need superconducting wire, niobium alloys are used, which make fine wire, but these only superconduct under liquid helium temperatures).

Re:when can I buy some

[Smallpond]

excellent, i'm very excited. when can I buy a roll of this new wire at home depot?

They have it, but it takes 45 minutes to find someone who knows where it is, and then you have to move 5 boxes of broken ones to find the one unopened box that has it. Then you find out it is a cheap Chinese knockoff made of "Saffire" instead of the sapphire superconductor that you wanted.

Re:Audiophiles

[Smallpond]

I guess it's time to just throw away the gold speaker cables.

The sapphire is just a substrate

[Stenboj]

See http://www.rdmag.com/RD100-Awards-Rounding-The-Edges-On-Superconductor-Wires/ which I reached via the sapphire outfit's site. The sapphire is a substrate for epitaxial deposition of an unspecified superconductor. It is not the conductor and the story is making more sense now.

My 2 cents

[drolli]

Interesting approach, but the linked article is so bad even i had to scratch my head for a few minutes and follow the link to the company to understand it (Sapphire is a nearly perfect insulator, even at low temperatures, what the linked article calls glue seems to be the (epitaxially grown?) HTC SC material).

to address some comments here: the use of liquid nitrogen is not the special thing here. Cables cooled by liquid nitrogen have been in test for a long time.

What i am missing is a comparison to other superconducting cables, so AFAIU:

Normally to make HTC SC wire you grow HTC crystals (a dark art by itself, much like cooking), crush these and press it into a metal band to be able to bend the conductor and you essentially hope that somehoe the grains inside the filaments touch each other (they do). The current is only carried in the surface of the grains anyway and these HTCs are brittle, so you can in principle use a very stable insulator core (like sapphire), grow a thin layer of HTC on it (of which you can control the composition perfectly) and save the effort of providing additional mechanical stability.

Another article

[ansak]

Okay, so IEEE has the bulk of the article behind a pay wall but the abstract here makes it plain that we're talking about superconduction at 77 K, close to the boiling point of Nitrogen but as someone pointed out, Sapphire is the substrate on which another high-temperature superconductor is laid out and the resulting material only superconducts at microwave frequencies.

But any advance in this area is a good thing, if you ask me. We don't have enough copper to serve everyone's needs and its Ohm's Law losses are too much to be acceptable in the future.

cheers...ank