No, but that to be meaningful requires a lot of other constraints to be satisfied. Like fuel cells, in theory its great until you actually try and build one, and then you quickly run into severe performance limitations,
Well it just goes to show, that scientists cant do engineering, because they are all theory, no practice, and someone else's money...
Run a power cable through the centre of the earth so we can buy solar power from Australia when it is dark here?
Not my understanding. Superconductors will only support a magnetic field up to a certain strength, admittedly fairly high. But above that, they no longer stay superconducting, and to achieve the highest magnetic fields, air-cored copper is used, copper piping with water cooling probably. It's been getting on for fifty years since I was peripherally involved with a lab-scale superconducting magnet, so things may have changed by now, but at the time, that was the case. I forget which lab was using them, possibly the Clarendon, but someone had bought massive DC dynamos from London Underground that were being replaced to drive their high-intensity air-cored magnet.
Ever been inside a large magnet? I went in a 2MW (IIRC) one at CERN once (without wallet, watch, etc, obvs). Trying to manipulate a baked-bean-tin-sized aluminium cylinder is interesting under those conditions. Don't think I had any long-term effects from that but who knows.
Meanwhile a few days later someone escaped injury in a similar visit due to a spanner left accidentally inside flying from floor to ceiling at a great rate. I suspect that was the end of such escapades.
Get yourself a magnetar if you want a large field.
angle grinder and an SDS should be all you need....
Nearest I've got is an MRI scan magnet. Small by CERN standards.
do they make bits that long?
Lossless distribution makes an awful lot of substations redundant, TurNiP.
Yep, those undersea sub-stations - we definitely don't need those.
No, it doesn't. You simply do not understand why they are there. Or the limitations of superconduction.
NO since the pressures you need to make it work, over 5000 atmospheres is almost as impossible to get as absolute zero. I believe its metallic Hydrogen is it not? Brian
No it was theorised that Metallic hydrogen, which occurs at huge pressures should have zero resistance. It just means that in a lab somebody managed to do that for long enough to be pretty sure they were right. The problem with the room temperature is that there is randomness in the internal structure, we see as resistance. The two ways to reduce random fluctuations is by getting to absolute zero or great pressures, effectively squeezing out the ability for the atoms to move at all. Might be handy for a wire running through thats core I guess, but there is a small snag there!
Brian
Metallic hydrogen is still in the realms of computational simulation with only very slim experimental evidence as yet. It also requires a diamond anvil and working pressures above 3M bar.
They think that experimentalists may have seen the analogous phase to graphite if the latest papers are to be believed:
Why not "experimentors" ?
Until somebody comes up with some numbers - yes. Do you have some I don't know about?
Andy
Well I patently don't have crucial ones such as the cost of the superconductor and its critical current since they are unknowable until someone comes up with a practicable new SC.
OTOH I don't write off a technology just because with current options it is only economic for niche applications.
The AC/DC convertors may need to be there but if you have a truely lossless distribution you don't need all that stepping up to 500 kV and back down to avoid the distribution cable I^2R losses. You can distribute at the final 415 V three phase over something very small, no losses, no heating... All the supercondutor has to do is have enough physical space to carry enough electrons (aka current) to produce the required fields in, say, a motor. Electrons are very, very small. B-)
What I'm struggling with is the division by zero in I = V/R.
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