from the superconductor-in-Spanish-is-superconductor dept.
European researchers said Tuesday they had developed a cheaper and more efficient superconducting tape which could one day be used to double the potency of wind turbines.
Eurotapes, a European research project on superconductivity—the ability of certain materials to channel electricity with zero resistance and very little power loss—has produced 600 metres (1,968 feet) of the tape, said the coordinator of the project, Xavier Obradors, of the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona.
"This material, a copper oxide, is like a thread that conducts 100 times more electricity than copper. With this thread you can for example make cables to transport much more electricity or generate much more intense magnetic fields than today," he told AFP.
"This new material could be used to make more potent and lighter wind turbines," he added, predicting it will make it possible to manufacture wind turbines one day with double the potency than existing ones.
No graphene was involved in this announcement.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PiMuNu on Friday March 17 2017, @11:34AM (1 child)
The article doesn't say anything.
Skimming the Eurotapes website - they seem to have been fiddling with industrialisation of existing technologies e.g. YBCO. US DoE tried something similar about 10 years ago but did not really get very far. But there is no "breakthrough". It's all about pushing manufacturing techniques to bring costs down a bit. The "news" is that Eurotapes funding round finished. I hope they get it renewed.
http://eurotapes.eu/images/Roda_de_premsa_Eurotapes_Albert_Calleja.pdf [eurotapes.eu]
I love slide 9 ( INGRESSOS ANNUALS i PROJECCIONS) showing income to date (I think) as flat flat flat and then projected income exponentially growing. With a big fat arrow pointing up. Dilbert would be proud.
Nb: I am really looking forward to industrialisation of High Temperature Superconductors - if I was CERN Director General I would be dumping bucketloads of cash into this.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 17 2017, @05:59PM
(Score: 1) by Soylentbob on Friday March 17 2017, @11:37AM (4 children)
Can someone more knowledgeable than me elaborate? Where does the power loss come from in this case? Is it the magnetic field cast by the current?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @03:39PM (1 child)
zero: limit n->inf 1/n
If they found a way to make it be absolute 0 resistance, we would be reading about that instead.
(Score: 1) by Soylentbob on Friday March 17 2017, @04:28PM
That is what I assumed, and why I checked on wikipedia [wikipedia.org] (which is usually accurate in those things)
Superconductivity is a phenomenon of exactly zero electrical resistance
(emphasize added)
Better conductivity by factor 100 doesn't even come close to 0...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday March 17 2017, @09:15PM
There is no power loss in the superconducting state. There is, however, a maximum current you can send through before superconductivity breaks down. AFAIK this is, indeed, because of the magnetic field of the current.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday March 18 2017, @12:53AM
No direct power loss in the superconductor due to resistance, but any time you move any conducting object into or out of the magnetic field generated by the current you will get some power loss due to induced currents in the object. With decent design, this loss is far less than is lost in resistive conductors.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @12:38PM (5 children)
i thought the "deal" with lots of AMPS was always to generate a strong magnetic field.
having lots of voltages gives you less resistance but (and?) not much in the field of ...errr ... generating magnetic fields
(though giving birth to charged "free space" particles likes lots of voltage).
so the "break through" is that to carry many amps for a magnetic field you don't need arm-thick cables anymore and which thus can be coiled
more "next to each other" ... so instead of having, say 20 winding spaced over 1 meter, you can get 100 winding over half a meter?
thus more compact generators and motors?
i don't see much else use for amps and superconductors :\
(Score: 2, Informative) by sea on Friday March 17 2017, @12:55PM (4 children)
Magnetic field strength falls off very, very quickly with distance, so if you can make a more compact generator, you can put the thing you want to influence much, much closer to the cores and therefore put it right in the center of a terribly powerful magnetic field.
So basically we can now influence things with stronger magnetic fields than were practical before. Our new 'maximum practical strength' has gone up. Every rotor-stator-based generator benefits now, and will be able to extract energy far more efficiently. I'm pretty sure that every motor becomes more potent as well, so we can spin drills faster, build bigger ships with stronger propellers, faster jet engines (the air intake turbine can spin faster now) and so on and so on.
This will pretty much upgrade all our machinery across the board.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday March 17 2017, @02:40PM (2 children)
> faster jet engines (the air intake turbine can spin faster now)
How would this help? Air intake compressors are mechanically linked to the rear turbines of the jet. There is no need for motor/generator setup there (you would just add reliability issues and energy losses)
(Score: 1) by sea on Wednesday March 22 2017, @05:13PM (1 child)
Huh? I thought they ran independently? How do you start the engine, then? Something has to start the compressor before the rear turbines can begin to spin..
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday March 23 2017, @09:23AM
> Huh? I thought they ran independently? How do you start the engine, then? Something has to start the compressor before the rear turbines can begin to spin..
Having the two turbines decoupled would be a loss of efficiency, because you are doing energy conversion (e.g. rotary to electric then back to rotary), while a fixed shaft just transmits energy without conversion. Also the motor/gen set would be a lot heavier than a shaft.
They have a dedicated starter, like a car engine. On airplanes, they tend to have a small engine (either reciprocating or turbine) called a "APU" (Auxiliary power unit). This is started by ground power (usually electric, like your car starter motor). Once this engine is running, it provides electricity, compressed air and hydraulic power to the rest of the aircraft while on the ground.
This allows the ground crew and pilots to check the environmental systems, hydraulic flaps, electrics all work as intended.
Then, this APU power is used to spin up the main engines, one at a time. On pretty much all passenger airlines, this is using air compressed by the APU. Compressed air is blasted against the exhaust turbine of the jet engine, causing it to spin. As it starts spinning the compression turbine spins at the front as well (as it is connected by the shaft) pushing more air in. Then you inject fuel and fire the spark plugs. Once the combustion chamber takes fire the reaction becomes self sustaining, et voila! Running jet engine.
Repeat the above for each other engine on the aircraft, wait for engines to reach operating temperature, turn off APU, and you are ready to fly!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2017, @03:35PM
it also seems that with super conductors, you can "freeze" a magnetic field (configuration) to your liking:
it seems possible to "charge" a super conductor with a current (amps) then loop it back
onto itself (like a real loop), remove the current source and voila, the current keeps circling inside the super conductor (and is the source of a magnetic field!).
thus, you don't need to dig out chinese neodymium and then cast it into complex shapes and then "magnetize" it
into a permanent magnet form.
rather you take the super-wire, bend it into the shape you want it to emit a magnetic field from, cool it down and then do the
amp charging trick and loop-back-onto-itself thingy, remove the charge source and voila you turned a super-conducting loop into a
a permanent magnet that only needs to stay cooled to remain a strong, easily formed "permanent magnet"?
thus the "stator" or rotor, whatever, doesn't need to constantly be feed with current but rather is like a generator or motor with permanent magnets?
pretty awesome .. alink between "magnetic field source" and
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @01:54PM (3 children)
"that conducts 100 times more electricity than copper..."
No shit, that's why it's called SUPERconductor.
No comparison with other superconducting materials
No reasons given for calling it "breakthrough"
Most likely, possibly a minor improvement blown up to seek more funding.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Soylentbob on Friday March 17 2017, @03:02PM (2 children)
I'm not a specialist, so please correct me if I'm wrong. The article mentions nitrogen for cooling, and emphasize that they created a 600m wire. From what I understand, most high-temperature superconductors are ceramics, and therefore brittle, which is hard to handle for wires. Not sure, how many companies are able to produce high-temperature superconducting wires at volume, but I think that is the goal here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:04PM (1 child)
TFA left most facts about their research out. Most critically the article didn't mention what temperature their tape goes superconducting. Room Temperature? Liquid Nitrogen required?
(Score: 1) by Soylentbob on Friday March 17 2017, @05:19PM
From TFA:
To achieve zero-loss power transmission now, cables encased in tubes can be cooled with liquid nitrogen to make them superconductive—but the complex and expensive technology has not been commercially used on a large scale.
Since it started some more generic comments some lines ago, I'm not certain if this is supposed to refer to the product in question or is a more general statement, though.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday March 17 2017, @10:01PM (1 child)
which could one day be used to double the potency of wind turbines.
If you're going to dumb it down, at least use a vaguely cromulent word.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2017, @06:46AM
It may have not been cromulent, but it was impotent.