A question about superconductvity?

Question

I watched a programme about superconductors and their uses and also read on the web that the following would be the uses of room tempreature superconductors, but what does this mean to someone who does not have much scientific knowledge:

transformers, power storage devices, electric power transmission, electric motors, magnetic levitation devices etc.

It all sounds amazing but what specific devices would this cover and is it ever going to be a real possibility, what challenges are ahead for this technology?

Answer 1

Superconductivity is already in use, especially for very strong magnets. The drawback is the cost of cooling. What is available now is what's called high temperature superconductivity. This means liquid nitrogen is adequate, and you don't need liquid helium for cooling. There is no guarantee that superconductivity will ever be achieved at room temperature.

There are plenty of scientific and engineering tasks which need to be accomplished to make practical use of even high temperature superconductivity. Besides the cooling, the materials need to be strong enough to withstand the mechanical stresses of use, and the intense magnetic fields which are usually part of making use of superconductivity. Manufacturing needs to become reliable and economical. I think this is a technology which will see gradually increased use.

Answer 2

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity
with no resistance. This means that, unlike the more
familiar conductors such as copper or steel, a
superconductor can carry a current indefinitely without
losing any energy. They also have several other very
important properties, such as the fact that no magnetic
field can exist within a superconductor.

Diamond anvil cell, used to apply pressure to a sample
in the laboratory, often to increase the TC of a
superconductor. It is composed of 2 diamonds and a
stainless steel gasket containing a small chamber full
of fluid. Hydrostatic forces in excess of a million
atmospheres can be brought to bear on a sample
suspended within the fluid.

An area where superconductors can perform a life-saving
function is in the field of biomagnetism. Doctors need
a non-invasive means of determining what's going on
inside the human body. By impinging a strong
superconductor-derived magnetic field into the body,
hydrogen atoms that exist in the body's water and fat
molecules are forced to accept energy from the magnetic
field. They then release this energy at a frequency
that can be detected and displayed graphically by a
computer. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) was actually
discovered in the mid 1940's. But, the first MRI exam
on a human being was not performed until July 3, 1977.
And, it took almost five hours to produce one image!
Today's faster computers process the data in much less
time.

Electric generators made with superconducting wire are
far more efficient than conventional generators wound
with copper wire. In fact, their efficiency is above
99% and their size about half that of conventional
generators. These facts make them very lucrative
ventures for power utilities.

Recently, power utilities have also begun to use
superconductor-based transformers and "fault limiters".
The Swiss-Swedish company ABB was the first to connect
a superconducting transformer to a utility power
network in March of 1997. ABB also recently announced
the development of a 6.4MVA (mega-volt-ampere) fault
current limiter - the most powerful in the world.

An idealized application for superconductors is to
employ them in the transmission of commercial power to
cities. However, due to the high cost and
impracticality of cooling miles of superconducting wire
to cryogenic temperatures, this has only happened with
short "test runs". In May of 2001 some 150,000
residents of Copenhagen, Denmark, began receiving their
electricity through HTS (high-temperature
superconducting) material. That cable was only 30
meters long, but proved adequate for testing purposes.

The National Science Foundation, along with NASA and
DARPA and various universities, are currently
researching "petaflop" computers. A petaflop is a
thousand-trillion floating point operations per second.
Today's fastest computing operations have only reached
"teraflop" speeds - trillions of operations per second.
Currently the fastest is one of the IBM Blue Gene/L
computers running at 280.6 teraflops per second (with
multiple CPU's). The fastest single processor is a
Lenslet optical DSP running at 8 teraflops.

In the electronics industry, ultra-high-performance
filters are now being built. Since superconducting wire
has near zero resistance, even at high frequencies,
many more filter stages can be employed to achive a
desired frequency response. This translates into an
ability to pass desired frequencies and block
undesirable frequencies in high-congestion rf (radio
frequency) applications such as cellular telephone
systems used by many.

http://superconductors.org/
http://www.superconductorweek.com/
http://superconductor.sourceforge.net/
http://superconductors.org/News.htm
http://www.microsoundmusic.com/superc.htm
http://www.amsuper.com/
http://www.topix.net/com/amsc
http://sourceforge.net/projects/superconductor

JPS Labs developed Superconductor cables for Amps,
preamps, speakers, and digital audio.
http://www.jpslabs.com/Reviews/SS11.htm

Silicon -- the archetypal semiconductor -- has at long
last been shown to demonstrate superconductivity. By
substituting 9% of the silicon atoms with boron atoms,
physicists in France have found that the resistance of
the material drops sharply when cooled below 0.35 K
(Nature 444 465). This will have wide range of
applications in electronics.
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/11/19/1

Answer 3

Since yoau watched a program on superconductors, im not going to go into detail on what they are. Anyway, you won't be able to see them. ever. Period. Why? To make one, you have to freeze an object to absolute zero (-273 C), which is impossible due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of the quantum theory. It says that a particle's position and velocity is never 100 percent certain. Because of this, you cannot stop all things from moving 100 percent, and you cannot reach absolute zero, and you cannot make a superconductor.

Answer 4

I'm guessing you have a tendency to overthink things. There are already Superconductors in a sense but from your question you are asking about things you will never see in the next 15 years at least.