Okay, so probably more efficient electronics and power grids, MRI machines without helium, probably easier maglev tech, …?
Ok, I see a lot of false info in here. EE chiming in here.
Minor efficiency improvements: consumer electronics, batteries, solar panels, CPUs/GPUs
Major efficiency improvements: power transmission, wireless power transmission, electric motors, high density electro-magnets (used in fusion, MRI, etc), ‘traditional’ energy generation techniques that spin a thing to produce electricity (wind, nuclear, hydro, gas, (even coal, but let’s pretend coal doesn’t exist)).
Outside of my expertise, but I’m speculating major improvements: wired and wireless data transmission (antenna tech)
The implications that excite me the most are mostly around transportation.
-Realistically, of existing technologies I think electric motors are the biggest winner with superconductors. For the most part, the size and power of electric motors are constrained by how to get the electrical waste heat out. With superconductors you don’t have electrical waste heat. You can create incredibly small, powerful, efficient electric motors with super conductors. This means efficiency gains in so many of our big ‘energy sinks’ right now. Transportation, air conditioning, manufacturing… I mean it would be a largely unnoticed improvement to almost every aspect of our modern lives.
-Cars with close to 100% regenerative braking (superconductors+capacitors for temporary energy storage) You could stop at a red light and accelerate back to the same speed ‘for net-zero energy’. THAT IS BANANAS! A current conventional gas car burns fuel for ~30% efficiency, the other 70% is waste heat. Then after you’ve done all that inefficient work to get moving you hit the brakes and USE FRICTION TO TURN YOUR MOMENTUM INTO MORE WASTE HEAT! Bugs the bajesus out of me! Superconductors would make it much more practical to recoup energy when stopping a vehicle.
Then you can get into cool new technologies:
-Mag-Lev trains would be super cool. I don’t see a huge practical benefit since the mechanics of train wheels on rails are pretty efficient as is, but come on… levitating trains? so cool!
-Rail gun style space launch systems (unfortunately, this comes with rail gun style weapons too, sorry everybody!)
-Tokamak nuclear fusion reactors are currently constrained by the strength of the magnetic fields they can produce using electromagnets. The limiting factor is largely cooling for these electromagnets and the associated superconductors. Room temp superconductors allows for much more compact designs for the magnetic confinement infrastructure used in these facilities.
-You could make a friggin mag-lev skate park. Hoverboards! REAL FRIGGIN HOVERBOARDS could be produced!
-(I think) We can actually start talking about ‘active support’ structures. Buildings that would not be possible because of the compressive or tensile strength of known materials can be supplemented by active support through electromagnets!
-This removes probably the biggest constraint in electrical engineering and design. We will see amazing technology come out of this that none of us can predict.
EDIT (I’m just gonna keep adding these as they get mentioned elsewhere):
-Magnetic energy storage. Similar to how an electrical transformer works: You induce a current to flow which ‘stores’ the energy in a magnetic field. In the case of magnetic energy storage you just leave that current flowing. No resistance means it will flow indefinitely. You can then extract it directly or through interaction with the magnetic field.
Only major thing you didn’t mention that I noticed is applications for quantum locking. From my understanding, superconductors would allow us to make frictionless, lubricationless “ball” bearings
How much force can one of these locks take without slipping?
You touched on regenerative breaks, but what about for EV’s with power management? Will we see longer ranges on the same platform due to needing less power from the battery or is that going to require a full redesign
You certainly would see longer ranges for the same battery if you just swapped the cabling and motor over to superconducting versions, but there are kind of two scenarios at play here.
You have highway driving where a lot of your losses are mechanical due to high sustained speeds (air resistance and friction). Those wouldn’t go away, but your “electrical to mechanical” losses would be reduced, so you’d see modest improvements.
Then you have around town driving where your losses from accelerating and decelerating are much larger than the mechanical losses (air resistance and friction). Here with proper design changes I think you would see spectacular improvements in efficiency.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t help much with the EV ‘range anxiety’ issue haha. Go figure.
I don’t have range anxiety lol. I think once most people get in an EV they would realize the anxiety isn’t needed. But seeing the boosts to range does help with that anxiety. I’ve been watching this and the solid state battery tech for a bit now. I’m not an expert in either but I feel like with solid state batteries finally hitting the market and now this, driving could be revolutionized in less than 10 years
Anything electric would be dramatically improved. Electric car range, consumer devices like computers and phones would have a huge jump in efficiency, etc. You name it basically.
In theory, the cost of getting an MRI would come way down due to not having to keep the coils crazy cold. In practice, we have capitalism, so it’ll probably go up
In practice, the medical market is one of the most heavily regulated in history. We definitely don’t have capitalism in medicine.
If we did, prices would go way down.
Having a conductor with zero resistance allows to transmit (regenerative) power from where it can be generated for free (solar in the desert) all across to where it is needed without loosing any power on this way.
The potential for tech miniaturization alone is a massive deal.
Right now, one of the biggest obstacles toward packing more transistors into a given space is the fact that they radiate a shit ton of heat which must be removed by close to immediate contact with the heat sink.
Without the need to deal with a shit ton of waste heat, instead of only having one, or only a couple layers of transistors in a processor, you can stack that shit high. Volumetric processing. Instead of wider chips, we could have taller chips. Hell we could stop calling them chips, and start calling them blocks!
If our processors could be as dense vertically as they are horizontally, we would see entire orders of magnitude more processing power, and, because a lot of energy is not being lost to heat, it’s actually being used productively. Or in other words, you need less energy and yet can accomplish even more work.
The overwhelming majority of the heat from processors is not from resistive power dissipation, it’s from transistors switching state. This will not go away because of superconductors.
I read in another comment somewhere that introducing a superconductor wouldn’t change the properties of the semiconductor bits. So the transistors themselves would still produce heat. But there are also full-conductor bits that produce heat that might be eliminated.
If I am recalling an article correctly - superconductors mean zero resistance electric transfer. Currently anything using electricity loses power due to resistance when travelling - partly why a CPU gets so hot for example. By having zero resistance, far less power is lost to resistance and heat which means more power efficiency
Electric resistance is not the primary cause of energy turnover in CMOS logic. See this comment in this same thread: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/1799661
@[email protected] @[email protected]Thanks you so much for correcting me. although my knowledge is extremely in this field, i my comment wasn’t a random speculation by me but stems from several discussions from Ycombinator threads i read so i don’t know what to think.
Wireless charging of mobile devices generates lots of heat which then degrades the battery. If we had superconductors, the charger wouldn’t heat up at all no matter how high the current is. The chemical reactions inside the battery might still generate heat, but the rest of the system wouldn’t.
The chemistry obviously has its limitations too, but as far as the charger and internal electronics of the device are concerned, having superconductors would speed up the process.
Everything that has lots of wired coil (motors, generators, turbines, wireless charging)
Less resistance = less energy lost in these endless wire coils.
It would take maglev from a laboratory technology to a common one. That would be an enormous boon to rail tech, especially in high density corridors.
A common one everywhere except for the US *
It’d be in the US, too. It’d show up in places like Disney parks, as an attraction. :(
especially in high density corridors.
It would require building additional tracks (that would be expensive to maintain), so doubt it.
I don’t disagree with you, but for the sake of keeping a hopeful tone, let’s say that all of this is in Minecraft.
More efficient battery technology. Imagine being able to have a battery in your laptop that lasts for weeks.
This isn’t true… Resistance of conductors is not what’s holding battery technology back. It’s battery chemistry. You could improve some efficiency with superconductors but the chemistry is really the limiting factor these days.
If you’re referring to more efficient computers, that will land you in the same situation. Minor improvement in efficiency, but the power hog for that is transistor switching which won’t be improved with superconductors.
I think what they’re referring to is the idea that superconductors can trap current effectively indefinitely; more like replacing a battery with a capacitor than enhancing existing battery chemistry.
That’s not going to happen though. Superconductors won’t make capacitors store energy for longer durations. They won’t improve battery chemistry technology. They won’t significantly improve CPU efficiency. They’d make consumer electronics slightly more efficient, but replacing all the conductors in your phone with superconductors isn’t going to make your battery last even 25% longer.
You’ve misunderstood me. None of those things are what that commenter is referring to. It’s not about improving another energy storage technology by using superconductors, it’s about having a room temperature, ambient pressure version of an existing technology that we already use superconductors for.
Understood, my mistake. This is pure speculation, but I doubt you’d see those in consumer electronics. Those energy storage devices would essentially be very power electromagnets and I really don’t think people would be walking around with those in their pockets. I do agree that they would be super useful for grid-level energy storage though! If you can engineer around the large magnetic field they’d create it would be a super efficient energy storage device!
Also, sorry in advance - this is me being nit-picky, but that would be more analogous to replacing a battery with an inductor (not a capacitor). Inductors store energy in magnetic fields, capacitors store them in electric fields. Doesn’t really matter… I’m just being pedantic.
Fair points!
Can you elaborate on this? I always thought the limits on batteries was the energy density of the chemistry rather than heat/conductivity of the components. What am I missing?
It’s a zero resistance environment. Usually you would have to use liquid nitrogen to freeze something lime a hockey puck. There are some really cool things you can do then. Especially with magnets. Lay out a track of magnets and something thar is superconducting will hover over then. If you push it it will keep its speed unless acted upon by other forces. Now imagine we don’t need to freeze the material…
Last I read, current solar panels were only about 8% efficient. That number would skyrocket…
This would not have a significant impact on solar panel efficiency.
Why not? I too have been watching the excitement but am not understanding the oomph.
There are two major mechanisms at work with a solar panel circuit. The production of “free electrons” and then the flow of the “free electrons”. Solar panels are basically special crystals that make the “free electrons” when they’re hit with sunlight. Once the ‘free electrons’ are produced, they flow through conductors to do whatever electrical work we want them to do.
The that special crystal is what is inefficient and it can’t be replaced with superconductors. Only the flow portion of this circuit could be replaced with superconductors.
I hope this helped, it’s a pretty simplified explanation.
It did help, thank you!
I think it’s because the PV cells will still only be able to generate the same amount of electricity from the sun.
Home mag-lev. Build the super-conductor into the flooring of your home. Equip heavy furniture and appliances with electromagnets in the feet. Dial up the power on the magnets and the furniture will float up and you can slide it to it’s new location. Dial down the magnets and furniture will settle back to the ground.
You could be a crypto bro on a Raspberry Pi.
Hell, someone might finally max out Flight Simulator X.
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