10 ms·
I still have a very, very hard time understanding what all of this means. Is there an easy to understand explanation for a room temperature superconductor?
by Ajay-p 3y ago
I still have a very, very hard time understanding what all of this means. Is there an easy to understand explanation for a room temperature superconductor?
- lalopalota 3y ago[flagged]
- dustincoates 3y agoFrom the HN guidelines: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
- fredoliveira 3y agoIt takes very little to try and explain a concept to someone asking for pointers — assuming of course, you know the topic at hand. Your response is as unhelpful as it gets.
- TX81Z 3y agoHN tends to be a place where many technical experts explain complicated things succinctly because they know the audience here has a certain baseline of knowledge. I scrolled down until I found this question (as I have the same "huh, what is this anyway?" reaction). Because I'm a "Very Busy Person" and don't actually have all day to screw around with "every YouTube video", I come to HN to optimize my time spend/information gained ratio. Likewise, on this topic, even the above is still confusing. People say it's more efficient, then replies say we're already at 95-99% efficiency so it doesn't matter much. I'm still fairly confused!
- TheJoeMan 3y agoEver seen one of these high school science demos?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWojYBhvfjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWojYBhvfjM Now imagine one where you don't have to chill it with liquid nitrogen.
- declan_roberts 3y agoThe Meissner effect has a lot of potential even outside of the energy efficiency changes (which is by far the most important). It will be fun to see trains levitating over the ground without any friction loss from the wheels at high speed.
- ReptileMan 3y agoIsn't majority of energy lost spent on pushing air away when we talk about high speed trains
- recrof 3y agoyes, but friction of the track is also a big factor.
- roywiggins 3y agoA huge renaissance in desk toys, at the very least!
- spotplay 3y agoYou're joking but to be honest the reason I'm most excited at the moment about this discovery is because of desk toys. The way I would calculate excitement is usefulness / time to market and the respective graph of a superconductor application (at least in my monkey brain) peaks at desk toys since they would come first.
- digdugdirk 3y agoIt's a conductor of electricity. But super good at it. i.e. - It has zero resistance to electricity. Currently, the best superconducting materials we can create have to be chilled to near absolute zero, which means designing them to work in liquid helium baths. This is expensive, and difficult. If a material can superconduct at room temperature, now we're talking usage in general purpose consumer goods. As for why we want a superconductor? Real cool stuff happens when there's zero resistance to electrical current. I'm sure other people can add on to this, but for an immediate benefit - electricity transmission wouldn't have any losses. Imagine offshore wind turbines that could transmit power to Kansas from the Atlantic. It'd be a big deal.
- N1H1L 3y agoThey are also very good energy storage media. Combine that with zero transmission losses - you can now highly efficient EV powertrains that are significantly more compact. 1000 mile EVs become actually viable. Secondly, superconductors are one of the most promising platforms for qubits. Big boost for quantum computing - and these are just two applications off the top off my head.
- Geee 3y agoCan you point to a source of these superconducting energy storage mechanisms? How do they work? I briefly looked into it and found out that at least the current ones have very high power density, but low energy density.
- makeworld 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...
- Geee 3y agoThat's what I meant. It states energy density as 40 kJ/L. Lithium batteries have energy density up to 2.5 MJ/L. Fossil fuels and hydrogen way more.
- michaelmarion 3y agoIANAP, but a layman's understanding: the materials that we have available today to conduct electricity at or around room temperatures largely do so in an inefficient manner. As electricity moves through the material, some energy is wasted in the form of ejected heat. To circumvent this, physicists discovered superconductivity: a state in which a material is a perfectly efficient conductor of electricity. Thus far, to create a superconductive material requires keeping that material at extreme conditions of temperature and pressure. A room-temperature superconductor is a game-changer because we could get nearly-perfect energy efficient electric conduction without the additional energy overhead it takes to keep the material at such a dense pressure or extreme temperature. Such a material would have wide applications across a variety of disciplines. Here's a useful article as well: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-2048/26/11/113001 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-2048/26/11/1...
- mecsred 3y agoConductors carry electrical current but have resistance, so you lose power to heat. Superconductors have effectively zero resistance so you don't lose power as they conduct. We can make superconductors, but they only work at extremely cold temperatures, if they get too hot they turn back into bad conductors. This new material might be able to superconduct at room temperature, which means zero loss conductors without expensive bulky and complicated cooling systems. There are many cool things that can be done with zero loss conductors.
- aeternum 3y agoZero resistance and therefore zero electrical transmission losses would be one of the most significant real-world benefits. There are also some really cool levitation effects, demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPqEEZa2Gis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPqEEZa2Gis As to why this one works at room temp? It really needs quantum physics to explain.
- KSS42 3y agoSee: Weekly Science news by Sabine Hossenfelder Today we’ll talk about the new superconductor claim, bad news for new physics, a quantum radar, how to print origami, space-based solar power for a moon station, a dire prediction for the collapse of an ocean circulation, Europe’s first hyperloop test, why NASA shoots lasers at the rain forest, and of course, the telephone will ring. https://youtu.be/RjzL9cS3VW8 https://youtu.be/RjzL9cS3VW8
- delusional 3y agoI'm not expert, but I think about it like this: Resistance is the tendency of a material to convert electrical energy into heat. Higher resistance means more of the electrical energy is converted to heat per "time". A superconductor then has the cool property of being able to carry electrical energy without converting any of it into heat. That's obviously cool for energy transmission, but it also enabled some other counterintuitive effects. Magnetic fields moving through conductors induce electrical energy in the conductors. Normally this is quickly dissipated as heat, but in a superconductor this energy can't go anywhere, and the conductor therefore can't move through the magnetic field. We've already done a lot of experiments with superconductors, since we've found some that work at extreme cold, but room temperature superconductors would allow us to productive some of those cool ideas by making them economically viable.
- Workaccount2 3y ago>Higher resistance means more of the electrical energy is converted to heat per "time". This isn't really accurate because increasing the resistance of a resistor in a given circuit will actually decrease the amount of heat dissipated. W = IV where I = V/R plug that in we get W = (V/R)V = V^2/R So Watts = Volts^2/Resistance. Increase resistance, decrease watts. Its better to just say that resistance converts voltage to heat, and leave it at that. Also is why in the orginal paper (and other superconductor work) they measure voltage drop across the conductor. No voltage drop(loss) = no resistance.
- delusional 3y agoYeah, my explanation is clearly wrong since it also breaks down at a pretty obvious extreme. If your resistor is non-conductive (infinitely resistive) my model would suppose it would convert all the electricity into heat. What would actually happen is that no electricity would flow and we would therefore get no heat. I presented it as an intuitive "feel" based idea of what a resistor does. It's very much not a numerically useful or physically accurate one.
- esalman 3y agoThink your EV is so efficient that you only need to charge it once every 5000 miles.
- Salgat 3y agoHow does a superconductor help with that? Lithium ion is already 95-99% efficient, same with motors. It would help with the charging cable, but that's not increasing the battery capacity. Off the top of my head the main advantage here seems to be MRIs, maybe also maglev trains, maybe generators? It really depends on the form factor of this superconductor compared to copper wire.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- flimsypremise 3y agoZero loss of energy to heat in any of the conductors. You're not making the battery more efficient, you're making everything else more efficient.
- chrisco255 3y agoThat's not going to produce a 20x gain in efficiency. The primary problem with electric cars is energy density in the battery itself. Maybe if mag-lev cars are possible, you could get that kind of gain from the reduced friction.
- rodoxcasta 3y agoIf your loss goes from 5% to 1%, you have to deal with 80% less heat. So you can make 3x smaller motors. All the powertrain of these machines will be hugely simplified. That's no small deal, but in the grand scheme of things that a hot superconductor can give us.. I mean, this can (possibly, with decades of research) give us fusion, quantum computing, etc.
- 3y ago
- tomelders 3y agoHoverboards.
- mewse-hn 3y agoFor something close to home, imagine a gaming laptop that runs on full performance mode without generating any heat. Imagine datacenters running full workloads without needing cooling. Electromagnets are built with coils of copper magnet wire - an efficient conductor but generates waste heat - what if we could build those electromagnets with zero resistance? Electric motors become very exciting. The electrical <-> mechanical relationship gets transformed. We use electricity for everything, so it's hard to communicate the extent of the revolution. People keep bringing up MRI machines because they're on the ragged edge of electromagnet usage constrained by cooling.
- Axsuul 3y ago> For something close to home, imagine a gaming laptop that runs on full performance mode without generating any heat. Imagine datacenters running full workloads without needing cooling. Aren't there other components like transistors that will still generate heat?
- failuser 3y agoAvatar 3 will have practical unobtanium.
- shin_lao 3y agoSuperconductor are more efficient at transmitting energy, here are some consequences: - Cheaper electricity transportation - New kind of batteries - Consumer devices that don't heat up as you use them - Simplifies the design of fusion reactors, which means we could have fusion sooner and cheaper - Probably lots of things we can't even think of If this is true, then you still have a lot of time before you can do industrial replication but given the stakes I imagine we will see immense inflows of capital into this.