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Man-Made Material Pushes the Bounds of Superconductivity
An anonymous reader writes "A multi-university team of researchers has artificially engineered a unique multilayer material that could lead to breakthroughs in both superconductivity research and in real-world applications. The researchers can tailor the material, which seamlessly alternates between metal and oxide layers, to achieve extraordinary superconducting properties — in particular, the ability to transport much more electrical current than non-engineered materials."
Shall we call this material Borgium? Resistance is useless!
The question -- as it always is -- is: What is the operating temperature range for this material? Because if it's still "refrigerate or die", applications will not expand much beyond where they are today.
If we get superconductors we can use as power transmission lines in normal environmental temperature ranges, that'll be a serious game-changer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What is this non-engineered material you speak of? If there is something that we don't have a stress strain curve for, let's get the sucker to an Instron machine right away.
They stacked atoms in a very impressive way, but they don't actually say what their fancy new material can do. What's the critical temperature, guys? Why was that not the first question? How much current can it carry compared to other Type II superconductors? If it's an improvement by 3C, it's not a breakthrough. If it's 30C, you'll definitely have my attention.
You mean the copper wires that straddle the planet ... grew there?
The lack of specifics about the material's properties, such as actual operating range, and in particular, whether or not the material exhibits all of the characteristic phenomena that actual superconductors do suggests to me that this article is about something that has only been theoretically designed, and not actually built and its properties analyzed in a lab.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is a Jigawatt?
My family used to own a superconductor mine but we had to close it down due to competition from synthetic superconductors... I guess that is the way the cookie crumbles...
I am tired of hearing "could lead to breakthroughs in ..."
So I lean towards extraordinary evidence
The point is they have "engineered" a material to suppositively gives it better properties. This suggests that they are closer to solving the superconducting riddle, not that they have solved it. Maybe when they apply this method to other materials they can get better properties. This doesn't say anything for manufacturability either, but if they do find a material that works at room temperature, somebody will figure out a way to manufacture it.
does it blend?
Topological Superconductors - 300K and higher, but still not usable
The relevant google search.
A relevant result from Joint Quantum Institute
Ultraconductors got killed in the 2008 market crash. Had they not got killed, they were making superconductors out of plastic, they called it Ultraconductor. (Not to be confused with the speaker cables of the same name). This stuff conducted at room temperature a million times better than silver! I have no doubt they could have done it, had the economy not killed them. Here are the relevant patents.
US Patent 5,777,292 - Materials having high electrical conductivity at room teperatures and ... ...
US Patent 6,804,105 - Enriched macromolecular materials having temperature-independent high
Here's a 2005 interview (.pdf, sorry), which may give some insight about Ultraconductor.
The 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (pdf) offers some good info about conductive polymers.
US Patent 7,014,795 discusses the growth of crystalized electron pairs (otherwise referred to as polarons in other places), the diagrams are especially helpful.
I believe it is well within the capabilities of any non-chemistry adverse hackerspace to eventually create polymer cables which are 10 to 10 million times better than silver at conducting electricity.
"could" lead to "breakthroughs"
Wake me up when they make a product. I'm tired of a decade of /. announcements that "could" lead to efficient solar cells, cures for cancers, etc.
Ultraconductors got killed in the 2008 market crash. Had they not got killed, they were making superconductors out of plastic, they called it Ultraconductor [chavaenergy.com]. (Not to be confused with the speaker cables of the same name). This stuff conducted at room temperature a million times better than silver! I have no doubt they could have done it, had the economy not killed them.
A viable room-temperature superconductor (even if only unidirectional) would be so useful that I can't believe that the '2008 market crash' was the only factor keeping them from market. Heck, that's Nobel-prize-worthy research if they can prove how it works.
With patents to back it up rather than peer-reviewed papers, this squarely into 'extraordinary claims without extraordinary results' land.
Definitely read the opening line as "A multi-universe team" - and was trying to figure out when Fringe's writers switched to science reporting.
A patent in no way shape or form means it works, or it works the way they say it does, or is even useful. It could be all of those, but there are enough patents on perpetual motion devices granted that I automatically assume a patent is utterly worthless unless demonstrated otherwise.
How's the salary at google? Lovin' the middle man...
Hell even if they can't figure out how it works the simple fact that if it did work (in only one direction so go DC power) would mean they would have more money than god in fairly short order. This seems to smell of those stories you hear that are usually 4th or 5th hand of someone who invented a carburetor in the 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s (In about 10 years you can add the 80s to that list) and put it on some big pig of a car and it got between 100 and 500 mpg and produced as much or more power than it did originally. The usual cited trip is LA to Las Vegas or NY to LA without having to buy any gas. Then some oil sheik, oil company exec, auto company exec, government agency either bought the patent (it would now be expired, so go find the damn thing and start making it), stole the device, or disappeared the inventor.
Actually come to think of it that company probably did fold because of the '08 financial crisis as their Ponzi scheme probably collapsed.
Time to offend someone
I highly doubt completely redoing the existing transmission infrastructure with conventional means is possible with the cost of building three nuclear plants, let alone a superconducting one. And I haven't even got to the current limits yet.
Not all at once, but the thing about almost any infrastructure, it gets old, and needs replacement eventually.
If in X years from now, the was a room-temperature superconductor that was roughly the cost of the old conductor (and could be used in parallel), then eventually replacement just becomes part of maintenance.
The website seems hardly professional and has a lot of buzzwords. They are not a real company offering a real product/technology, it's just snake oil.
Maybe the reason they suffered was not the market crash... but because they didn't know what they were doing. They were busy trying to find ways to get the semiconductor industry to replace BGA chip interfaces? That was the best idea they came up with, with a target market known for being slow to adopt new technology if it can't efficiently be working into the production line (you should see some of the ideas that get dropped because it is too slow, causing the price per chip to skyrocket)?
If they could produce macroscopic wires with even slightly better conductivity than silver, and somewhere within a factor 10 of price of silver (or a trade off... 10 times the conductivity for ~100 times the price), I can think of labs and equipment makers that would be jumping to get the material as soon as possible.
Assuming there science and engineering work was sound, there business sense must have been horrible.
I'm not saying that this is useless research, because it could eventually help us settle theoretical questions about the mechanisms of superconductivity. But with a critical temperature of 25K, it's not even a decent superconductor!
The "Learn" menu of Chava Energy consists of "Zero Point Energy", "Room Temperature Superconductors" and "Nikola Tesla".
I think I know exactly why Chava Energy went under and it's not the 2008 market crash.
The paper is freely available from the research group's website: http://oxide.engr.wisc.edu/publications.htm
Your "disclaimer" is actually a DISCLOSURE. Learn the difference.
Have a nice day.