Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who said infinite power?
It's implied by instant charging. The power would be the battery capacity divided by 0.
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A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
611–620 of 821 posts
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#612The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling. I had a hard time explaining this last night but we may very well be witnessing the beginnings of a technological transformation era much like when the p-n junction was invented. From the 1940s standpoint it would be hard to envision all we had today. - Lossless transport of energy - Batteries that don't take any time to recharge - Faster…
None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them. The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground. Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry. CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors. Turns out metals (in particular copper) are already incredibly good conductors.
Superconducting powerlines would be able to transport DC electricity with 0% losses. To put this in context: you could put solar panels in California, and send every watt of power to Alaska or New York, while losing nothing in the transport.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right about the energy density and limitations. I was more focused on the fast rate of storage and retrieval.
We already have incredible supercapacitors. https://www.eaton.com/gb/en-gb/catalog/electronic-components... I have 4 at home and blows people's minds when you melt a wire with it. Incredible rapid current delivery.
They don't store any meaningful amount of electricity (which is why they haven't supplanted Li-Ion batteries for power tools) and more importantly they have a cycle-life - they degrade from usage (source: my wife works for a supercapacitor manufacturer).
You also get losses from practical usage - i.e. no one can build a 3V supercapacitor that has decent endurance (you can totally build one which will work, but you're rating it knowing that every cycle is damaging it).
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
That'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.
If 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.
The motors are not a constraint though for electrical vehicles. The motors are already much smaller than equivalent ICEs, as seen in the empty "frunks" in most electric cars.
Agreed Fusion would be the biggest win possible.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to believe. After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other. ♫ It's the circle of life ♫
> I want to believe. Yeah, it's always possible this may not pan out but I'm really enjoying the visceral reminder that new fundamental science always has the potential to be suddenly transformative across a spectrum fields.
Yeah, I wasn't all that interested at first due to the general uncertainty around the claims, but that Derek Lowe takes it this seriously does lend a certain tension.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every day? I’m checking like every half hour
Best places to check if I’m casually interested?
I've been using this forum post: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...
But I'd also appreciate other links
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#617Someone posted this in a comment on another post of LK-99: Wouldn't the first step be verification before replication ? I.e. have the original authors send out some LK-99 samples to other researchers to at least confirm "Yes, this thing is a high temperature superconductor". Wouldn't matter even that much if it were made with unicorn dust: it would be proof that high temperature superconductors are even possible, whi…
Because unless all current replication attempts fail, it would be totally pointless.
I know we're all eager for news, but there's no urgent need to verify the claims. That's not how science works. Give it a couple weeks.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#618Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, the GP is just completely out of reality. We won't see lossless transmission in a very long time, and no place where an aluminum cable is too expensive today will become viable because something a million times more expensive is 9% more efficient. Batteries won't see a revolution because of this, there's simply no reason for them to (but they are currently in a revolution, and there are more to come). AC storage…
It's interesting you are saying superconductors are hard to make because... if this one really is a superconductor it's pretty easy to make. YBCO is also not particularly hard to make either.
The semiconductor industry is also very happy to do hard things for marginal gains. They've spent a decade swapping out semiconductor junction materials at enormous expense because there's no other option.
The idea that reducing power consumption is also not large enough to matter is...yeah, detached from reality. Thermal density has been an enormous problem with increasing CPU feature densities. CPUs already run hotter then a kitchen hot-plate, which is why so much effort has been put into dynamic throttling and other tricks - you straight up can't run CPU circuit elements full-power for very long without the risk of frying them, or requiring a cooling system which is impractical for widespread deployment.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#619The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling. I had a hard time explaining this last night but we may very well be witnessing the beginnings of a technological transformation era much like when the p-n junction was invented. From the 1940s standpoint it would be hard to envision all we had today. - Lossless transport of energy - Batteries that don't take any time to recharge - Faster…
None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them. The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground. Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry. CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors. Turns out metals (in particular copper) are already incredibly good conductors.
> CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors.
This is not true anymore. At leading edge process nodes (i.e., smaller conductor pitch), the bulk resistivity of copper changes dramatically because it is increasingly dominated by ballistic electron scattering on the interfaces and grain boundaries: surface area has decreased as a fraction of volume and the average grain size has shrunk to fit inside the interconnect lines.
Alternative metals like Cobalt and Ruthenium have been proposed and to some extent used in production as an alternative to Cu for the low interconnect layers, but they just arrest the trend -- the fact is that the interconnect resistance is much higher than it used to be.
It's also why a lot of the big players like TSMC and Intel are investing heavily in backside power delivery.
Here is an accessible article on the topic:
https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/backside-power-deliver...
(Also: high-voltage DC power is commonly used for long-range transmission and does not have coupling issues)
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume this would rule out things like fusion reactors, MRIs, and other high energy stuff. Would it still be revolutionary tech with a 150 mA limit?
Yes, it would be upending just about everything because the race would be on to improve on that. Think of it this way: once you show that something is possible at all there will be substantial funding available to improve on it. As long as you can't show that it is possible at all you're on your own. So if it works and that 150 mA is the limit then you can expect a ton of effort to be expended to improve on that and…
The current hypothesis is that most likely whatever they made is not a pure sample of the material which actually superconducts - this is expected, since when you make YBCO superconductors you also tend to get low yields (i.e. ~20%) that actually superconduct.
So it could be the whole sample, or it could one micron-sized link of grains of whatever the "real" material is running through the sample.