Re:Exotic New Superconductors Delight and Confound
by throwup238 on Friday December 13, 2024 @04:13PM
(#42412400)
Cuprates are also brittle ceramics so they’re difficult to shape and larger pieces and assemblies tend to run into issues with grain boundaries that interfere with superconductivity, so there’s a lot of practical issues. The classic superconductors are very low temperature but are much easier to cast.
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Re:Exotic New Superconductors Delight and Confound
by FredFS456 on Friday December 13, 2024 @05:49PM
(#42413044)
There's a few fusion startup companies using superconducting ReBCO tape to make their magnets. From the results that they're getting, I think we've largely cracked the engineering problems of making "wire" from ReBCO and it's largely just a scaling game now. I do want to point out that they're still cooling with liquid hydrogen at ~20K for high current capacity though.
Re:Exotic New Superconductors Delight and Confound
by cyberax on Saturday December 14, 2024 @02:12AM
(#42415269)
I invested in a couple of fusion startups (because why the hell not?), and the word on the street is that flexible tapes/wires are still not a solved question. Nobody can make them with consistent quality in large enough batches.