[UseofWeapons1]

Fascinating. This material alone would be revolutionary if legitimate, although I’m sure there’d be further improvements.

Question for any experts - what’s the relative difficulty of keeping something under sustained high pressure in a piece of hardware vs keeping it very cold?

Our ultra cold usages work decently well. Would it be any easier to keep a hardware component under pressure like what this new material requires?

[londons_explore]

Keeping things cold is effectively an energy vs space tradeoff.

For example, if you wanted to keep an underground superconducting wire cold, then you would send coolant pipes along it, and wrap it in an insulator. You need to put energy into chilling the coolant, inversely proportional to the thickness of the insulation.

However, typically for most things humans want to do, the cooling cost works out higher than the energy lost to resistance in a non-superconductor, so, apart from a few specialist use cases (MRI machines, particle accelerators), superconductors have seen no use.

[ReptileMan]

The second to holy grail is temperature above liquid nitrogen at around normal pressure with cheap and easy to obtain coolant. It will enable big things like really high voltage intercontinental transmission lines etc.

[zardo]

We've already got there with YbCO. But just barely, which means useful amounts of current and magnetic field density bring it out of the critical region.

[moring]

Is there some napkin math available on the net for a transmission line with a nitrogen-cooled high-temp superconductor (Tc > 90K) and thick thermal insulation? I mean for the energy required per km too keep it cooled below Tc.

[pfdietz]

We've had that for decades.