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What are the implications in general of room temperature superconductors? I just know that they needed typically ultra low temperatures right? But what would be
by brunooliv 3y ago
What are the implications in general of room temperature superconductors? I just know that they needed typically ultra low temperatures right? But what would be the practical implications?
- bibabaloo 3y agoThis thread covers some: https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1685088625187495936 https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1685088625187495936
- asimpletune 3y agoThe battery one is crazy, where you just store the electrons in a loop.
- aqme28 3y agoYou're basically storing your energy as magnetic potential. Pretty neat.
- XCSme 3y agoBut how do you get them out? Don't electrons prefer the path of least resistance, so that is staying in the superconductor? Or they won't stand still?
- jesse9766 3y agoConverting magnetic force into electrical current (electromagnetic induction) is the principal behind of all electrical power generation. SMES (superconducting magnetic electrical storage) is essentially an inductor made using superconductors. Electrical current gets converted into magnetic force and then back into electrical current when the circuit is discharged.
- XCSme 3y agoSo they still generate permanent electromagnetic force when "charged"?
- causalmodels 3y agoHoverboards.
- jjallen 3y agoIs this actually true? It is not obvious to someone somewhat versed in physics how this is enabled by room temperature super conductors unless the entire riding surface is magnetized.
- classicmotto 3y agoHow I get my head around it is, a material forged under ambient pressure and room temperature may be superconducting (lose resistance) as either pressure goes up or temperature goes down (or both).. so if the material itself is forged under high pressure and high temperature, the room temperature normal to us is very low for the material (?). Probably all materials are superconductors at some crazy pressure/temperature.
- jrflowers 3y agoPortable lightweight consumer rail guns
- seanthemon 3y agoFinally, i'm so tired of all these enterprise rail guns!
- Rzor 3y agoI think we also get closer to lightsabers.
- delecti 3y agoI think we need force fields before we could make something like a lightsaber, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has any idea how we could make a force field.
- fbdab103 3y agoLet's go bigger and build space cannons.
- motoboi 3y agoGet of my fuck lawn!
- dncornholio 3y agoHyperloop
- tarsinge 3y agoSCMaglev is a better design and application, no need for low pressure.
- sanxiyn 3y agoCooler chips. Chips heat due to resistance, and superconductors have zero resistance (by definition). I suspect this is the company's intended application. The following quote from their patent is very suggestive if you know about semiconductor manufacturing. > In addition, various energy sources used for deposition are not limited to chemical vapor deposition (CVD) using heat, but atomic layer deposition (ALD), sputtering, and thermal evaporation, e-beam evaporation, molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), pulsed laser deposition (PLD), etc. are also included without limitation as long as the raw material can be deposited. Listed methods are those used in semiconductor manufacturing to introduce materials to the wafers. It is also significant that the company's marketing material describes its resistance as "1/10^4 less than copper", because copper is currently used as a conductor in chips. (It wasn't always so, it used to be aluminium, which is a fascinating story itself. Read more on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_interconnects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_interconnects.) https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027537/en https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027537/en
- askvictor 3y agoIs the copper or the silicon responsible for most of the heat in a chip?
- sanxiyn 3y agoIt is the copper.
- russdill 3y agoSuperconductors don't make dynamic power somehow go to zero, switching from one state to another still means draining the capacitance.
- sanxiyn 3y agoSure, I said cooler chips, not chips with no heat.
- throwawaylinux 3y ago
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoAnything that uses electricity would use less electricity because you aren’t wasting it as heat. So in theory you could have a ridiculous computer that runs 1000GW of power through it without heating up. Or a flying car. Or power cables that lose nothing during travel. Naturally that’s why it doesn’t make sense. It’s too game-breaking to be possible in normal conditions. Glitching something out by making it basically maximum cold makes sense because you’re making it fully still so that it stops messing with the current. Glitching something out by squeezing it until it can’t move makes sense. Leaving it in a normal room means it would have to be something completely crazy.
- throwaway69123 3y agoIt makes about as much sense than a computer in your pocket that’s not even plugged in being many orders of magnitude better than a computer that takes up an entire room and can barely do on operation a second
- karmasimida 3y agoBattery is just one thing that stands in the way to make our phone more powerful, even totally remove the battery, it still takes up quite some space.
- red75prime 3y ago> computer that runs 1000GW of power through it without heating up It doesn't work like that. Non-reversible computations necessarily produce heat. The superconducting wires will not heat, but the CPU will.
- valine 3y agoThe thermodynamic limits of computation are so far below what we have today it would be a game changer to approach them.
- magicalhippo 3y ago> So in theory you could have a ridiculous computer that runs 1000GW of power through it without heating up. I touched on this in a previous thread[1], but superconductors only stay superconducting below not just a critical temperature, but also below a critical current density and critical magnetic field strength. These limits are different for different superconductors. It could very well be this superconductor has really high critical temperature but really low critical current density, in which case you can't have lots of current at zero resistance. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36931619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36931619
- silisili 3y agoIf this is true, I'm really curious why SK didn't bury them. Samsung foundries have been also rans for years, this seems like completely game changing technology. If it's real...
- picadores 3y agoDual batteryloops storing solar energy for years in lightweight constructs that have magnetic fields that can be seen from orbit ..
- astrange 3y agoWorldwide electric grid. Solar is all you need.
- contravariant 3y agoYou mean run a few loops around the equator and wait for solar wind, or what?
- mrtksn 3y agoYou can have a global grid of solar power. Since you don't loose energy on transmission and half of the planet is illuminated by the sun at any given time, you can have uninterrupted solar energy 24/7. The fuel is practically unlimited, the only cost would be the initial cost of building it and then only maintenance cost.
- ngc6677 3y agogreat idea! Can't wait you get funding for this project
- delecti 3y agoIt doesn't need to be done as a single super-project. Each step along the way could be a sensible, contained, and iteratively beneficial project. Lots of countries are already building up solar; as that progresses they could construct cross-border grid connections to balance out the load, then further build up solar capacity to be able to transmit your daytime excess to countries further from your solar peak. At that point it would only take a couple cross-ocean power lines to go from multiple continent-wide power grids to a single global one, and then everyone involved is even more incentivized to build excess solar capacity. It's not a piece of cake, but it's not a wild idea either. Adding a pair of LK-99 lines alongside each existing undersea optical line potentially gets you there by just increasing the maintenance budget. Lossless power transmission could change a lot of previously fundamental assumptions.
- mrtksn 3y ago
- mabbo 3y agoOne of the reasons we can't build a practical fusion reactor is that we need to make very powerful electromagnets. Doing so requires a lot of electricity going through big circular circuits. Doing that without a superconductor creates too much heat and the whole thing melts. They're trying to build them with existing superconductors instead, but those require super cold temperatures or super high pressure. This is (maybe!) a superconductor that's cheap and exists at normal temperature and pressure. It's got some deficiencies that would prevent it from being used in a fusion reactor, but it's existence may teach us how to build a better one that will work.
- ckmiller 3y agoPower conversion losses account for about 60% of the energy that goes into electricity generation in the US [1]. Superconducting generators and transformers could take that figure down to a fraction of that. [1] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/flow-graphs/electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/flow-graphs/electricity...