Re:Navy files for patent on room-temperature superconductor
by AnimalMuppet on Saturday February 23, 2019 @11:51PM
(#19237191)
Well, you could make the coil out of this room-temperature superconductor that the Navy just developed; then it wouldn't have any heat loss...
Oops.
You could think about taking two of these and weaving them in a helix around each other so that they each are creating the magnetic field for the other, except that:
1. The coil needs a pulsed current. It's not just a simple current-carrier. Trying to use it to also carry current is... probably going to be problematic.
2. If "non-linear vibration" means a mechanical vibration, that's probably going to be lossy. Worse, the loss is going to appear as heating of the superconducting wire, which could also cause problems.
Still, even with such a Rube Goldberg approach, getting superconductivity up to room temperature is a really big deal... if it truly works. If nothing else, it's going to show the way for a bunch of future work, some of which will (hopefully) improve on this.
Oops.
You could think about taking two of these and weaving them in a helix around each other so that they each are creating the magnetic field for the other, except that:
1. The coil needs a pulsed current. It's not just a simple current-carrier. Trying to use it to also carry current is... probably going to be problematic.
2. If "non-linear vibration" means a mechanical vibration, that's probably going to be lossy. Worse, the loss is going to appear as heating of the superconducting wire, which could also cause problems.
Still, even with such a Rube Goldberg approach, getting superconductivity up to room temperature is a really big deal... if it truly works. If nothing else, it's going to show the way for a bunch of future work, some of which will (hopefully) improve on this.