For more than a century, condensed matter physics has grappled with one of its greatest unsolved challenges: how to build superconductors that operate at room temperature and transmit electricity with no loss. Now, in a paper published in Nature, a team of Harvard physicists has reported new insights into why one promising superconductor has yielded mysteriously uneven results.
My favorite application for room-temp superconductors is low-speed generators. They have exactly one application, but it’s big: Wind towers without a giant gearbox. Wind power is cheap, but without the truck-sized gearbox with a bazillion moving parts that you can’t lift without the biggest cranes known to man, it’s even cheaper.
Can you expand on how that works please ? The gearbox converts the slow rotational speed of the turbine into a high rpm output because that is needed for the generator to make useful power as I understand it.
How does the superconductor convert that slow rpm ?
My favorite application for room-temp superconductors is low-speed generators. They have exactly one application, but it’s big: Wind towers without a giant gearbox. Wind power is cheap, but without the truck-sized gearbox with a bazillion moving parts that you can’t lift without the biggest cranes known to man, it’s even cheaper.
Can you expand on how that works please ? The gearbox converts the slow rotational speed of the turbine into a high rpm output because that is needed for the generator to make useful power as I understand it.
How does the superconductor convert that slow rpm ?
I like that you can build a global energy grid with superconductor. Power Europe at night with the solar panels in Australia, that kind of thing.
Would possibly take care of my country’s little problem of having 30 minutes of sunlight a day in the winter.
We don’t have nuclear either so you can imagine how nasty our energy mix gets in the winter.