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."

Comments

Resistance

[colinrichardday]

Shall we call this material Borgium? Resistance is useless!

Re:Resistance

[Greyfox]

Wouldn't that be Vogoninium?

Re:Resistance

[sconeu]

Yes, you're right. Borgium would have futile resistance.

We are Ohm of Borg. Resistance is Voltage divided by Current.
We are Coulomb of Borg. Resistance is futile. Voltage, on the other hand, has potential.

Resistance and temperature

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:Resistance and temperature

[i.am.delf]

The application I can see is stronger magnets. Right now the superconducting magnets we have are limited by the amount of current they can carry before they start misbehaving. The crappy part is that while we have superconductors which work at liquid nitrogen temperatures, they can't carry a whole lot of current. This leads to MRIs and NMRs using liquid helium cooled magnets which cost a ton of money to maintain. If this material can operate at LN2 temperatures and give the current density of the liquid helium magnets, they will have an amazing product on their hands.

Re:Resistance and temperature

[Guppy]

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.

I don't have a subscription to Nature Materials, but squinting at the thumbnail graphs available for free, looks like the transition temperature is somewhere around 17-24 Kelvin. As far as I can tell, main advance here is in improving Critical Current Density and Irreversibility Field limits.

Also, tag for story summary: whereisthefuckingpaper

Re:Resistance and temperature

[Drishmung]

The question -- as it always is -- is: What is the operating temperature range for this material?

They don't say. The most we know from the article is

its effective operating temperature is higher than that of conventional superconducting materials such as niobium, lead or mercury.

which means higher than 9.3K (Nb critical temperature).

The article also says:

Currently, even unconventional high-temperature superconductors operate below -369 degrees Fahrenheit.

or about 50K. Still below the magic 77K of liquid Nitrogen at which point things become economically interesting---and I can't see any statement in the article that the substance is even as good as, never mind better than 50K, although there is an implication that it is.

All in all, the article says remarkably little, at some length.

Re:Resistance and temperature

[Guppy]

From the Supplementary Materials PDF:

Tc,p = 0 Values

(STO 1.2nm / Co-doped Ba-122 13nm) x24 . . .= 17.0K
(O-Ba-122 3nm / Co-doped Ba-122 20nm) x24 . = 22.3K
(O-Ba-122 3nm / Co-doped Ba-122 20nm) x16 . = 22.9K
(O-Ba-122 3nm / Co-doped Ba-122 13nm) x24 . = 22.4K
(O-Ba-122 3nm / Co-doped Ba-122 13nm) x16 . = 22.5K
Single layer Co-doped Ba-122 . . . . . . . .= 20.5K

Re:Resistance and temperature

[plover]

Power transmission is the easy one to see a payoff for, though. I've seen various sources claiming power line losses run anywhere from 7% to 17%. Also consider the energy we use shipping trains full of coal from the mines across the country to the generating plants located near the consumers. Superconductive lines could enable them to build power plants near the mines and push the current over the grid.

Even if the tech was expensive to install on a per mile basis, if they could swap out the existing lines for superconducting lines, they wouldn't have to sign new land leasing deals for extra towers. Superconductors would enable them to shove 10X or 100X the power over the grid without having drastic changes elsewhere.

That's one of the biggest limiting factors to wind generation today, by the way. The grid across the sparsely populated windy plains was originally designed to carry just a few tens of megawatts into a region that doesn't have large industrial plants and doesn't see a high demand. It was never designed to carry gigawatts of power out of the area. New windmills are actually straining the existing grid. An efficient distribution network would let those prairie windmills sell power all the way out to the coasts.

Re:Resistance and temperature

[PerMolestiasEruditio]

There are quite a few other relatively cheap options below 77K. In particular using vacuum to lower the temperature of liquid Nitrogen is pretty easy and gets you to 64K with the nitrogen still a liquid. Same trick with liquid Oxygen (also dirt cheap) gets you to 55K and liquid Neon is about 25K (and when we run out of easily mineable Helium it will be cheaper than helium). Liquid Hydrogen can be used at down to 14K using evacuation (20K at atmospheric pressure).

Re:Resistance and temperature

[SternisheFan]

Here's the story from Science Daily

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130303154859.htm

Re:Resistance and temperature

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention, the "high temperature" superconductors we have now can't be easily made into wire for winding into magnets.

High temperature is relative here, they mean liquid nitrogen temperatures.

Re:Resistance and temperature

[symbolset]

You use vacuum to boil off a large fraction of the energy of the liquid nitrogen, leaving the remainder colder than it would normally be at room pressure.

Re: Resistance and temperature

[wesley96]

Well-maintained power grid can have transmission loss of around 4% as in the case of South Korea and Japan.

I think this is a practical limit as far as conventional conductors go. Unless the superconductors are ridiculously cost-effective to install and maintain, the benefits will never materialize - i.e. become a game changer.

To put this into perspective, let's try this. A relatively small country like South Korea still has more than ten thousand miles of transmission lines. Say you replace all that and achieve 4% more power.

Since the installed power capacity is around 70GW, that means about 3GW, or about three regular nuclear plants. 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.

This is why, if there's a superconductor breakthrough, I think it'll have more impact on medical uses rather than raw power transmission.


Disclaimer: I work in the electric power industry.

Re:Resistance and temperature

[justthinkit]

So you're the culprit!

So why call this a breakthrough?

[Dr. Spork]

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.

Re:Paywalled into obscurity - try this thread inst

[EdZ]

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.