Superconductors

[electronicka]

This may be a tough question but...

What do scientist look for when combining elements to raise the temperature at which superconductivity occurs?

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

This may be a tough question but...

What do scientist look for when combining elements to raise the temperature at which superconductivity occurs?

Super conductors are the cutting edge technology on electronic materials. general materials like the cooper wire, althouh they present very few electrical resistivity they do have a residual resistance and that causes not only powerloss due to Joule effect as it delays the time of transmission. Same goes for materials like iron for magnetic fields.
But due to a strage proprety materials present superconductivity at ceratin temperatures, i.e. they present no resistance (thus eliminating any loss due to joule effect or transmission delays).
The problem is those materials only present such propreties at very low temperatures, and whatever you could hope on gaining whit superconductivity is completly wasted for cooling (thermodinamics 2nd law states that heat from a colder reservoir can only pass to a hotter reservoir if you waste energy, and thus you need to spend energy for keeping the superconductors cool for them to be superconductors).
The main goal is to achieve a superconductor material at room temperature, thus have a working solution that doesn't requier to spend whit cooling.
Superconductors at room temperature will revolucionise the electronic and computing industry, it will not only improve by more then 10 times fold the efficiency of most electronic machines, computers will having the ability to easily improve computing speeds while using almost no energy what so ever.

Basically it is the current holy grail of electronics to have ideal materials that have no losses and thus being able to virtually run them without wasting any power.

 

[MachineSp1rit]

interesting. i just went through several sentences in wiki, my guess was that they can't achieve that small temperatures (close to absolute zero) so they make zero to come up to them, so to speak.

 

[Josan]

Guys, while your aswers were good, I don't think you understood the original question, I think he's asking about what materials they actually use, or what properties in materials they look for when trying to create super-conduction ceramics. That is, what are they actually looking for? (What material)

I might be wrong here, but that's at least the question I want answered

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

Altough I have some formation in material science, material science is not my speciality.
But you can find good information here.

 

[electronicka]

Guys, while your aswers were good, I don't think you understood the original question, I think he's asking about what materials they actually use, or what properties in materials they look for when trying to create super-conduction ceramics. That is, what are they actually looking for? (What material)

I might be wrong here, but that's at least the question I want answered

Yeah I don't blame anyone for not answering as its a hard question and only someone working in this field would probably know.

Thing that got me was how do they know what to use if they don't even know why its working?

I've been amazed at this stuff ever since I watched the video on youtube of the mini maglev superconducting train http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeS_U9qFg7Y

Also Michio Kaku talks about nanofabricators being a reality in the next decade or so, I was wondering if these would lead us to room-temperatue superconductors

 

[Grimlock]

I heard somewhere that they are actively researching Optical fibre cables to be able to receive several signals at once, this would i think (though i,´m not sure) increase your computers speed 800 times to even the fastest computer today.

The problem is that copper wire can only take so much heat before they break down, this greatly reduces the speed with which a computer can produce, since a lot of space needs to be used to place individual coolers so that the copper wires won,´t overheat.

So maybe thats the future super conductors.

 

[Sparky]

Often the combinations are a complete mistake or guess. Don't quote me on this but I had a lecturer tell me that copper doped with a non-conducting material (I think) raised the temperature required for the copper to superconduct by a few degrees - a significant change. Before this no one had tried doping with non-conducting materials as it was not expected that it would improve the desired properties of the copper. Often with these new fields where the rules and trends are not fully known, it is hard to know exactly what will work best.

 

[Josan]

Before this no one had tried doping with non-conducting materials as it was not expected that it would improve the desired properties of the copper.

That's a very good point. As I think (not sure) that the ceramics that currently hold records for superconductivity at the highest temprature aren't conductive at all at room temprature.

 

[Shapeshifter]

That's pretty cool, I didn't know they've made some huge progress just a few months ago:

29 January 2009
Signs of superconductivity near 218 Kelvin, reported by Superconductors.ORG as a minority phase on November 30, 2008, have now been confirmed.

24 March 2009
40 degrees below zero is cold by any measure. But, in the world of superconductors it's a record hot day. Superconductors.ORG herein reports an increase in high-Tc to 233K (-40C, -40F) through the substitution of thallium into the tin/indium atomic sites of the X212/2212C structure that produced a 218 Kelvin superconductor in January of 2009.

This is awesome.

 

[CupOfWater]

I just thought of somthing!

The reason for why superconducters is of no practical use today, is of course because we have to keep them constantly cooled down. And that requiers alot of liquid gas. The luiqid gas then evaporates, and we have to refill it.
BUT!

What if we put the superconductor and the liquid gas inside a sealed container? Then the gas wouldn't be able to evaporate!

 

[Josan]

What if we put the superconductor and the liquid gas inside a sealed container? Then the gas wouldn't be able to evaporate!

Wow... This was a parody... right?

 

[CupOfWater]

I have a feeling I have missed somthing basic :?

EDIT: Lol... I just realized what I wrote XD
Nevermind, BAD IDEA.

 

[edib0y]

Well, my thoroughly researched and highly scientific opinion is that scientists SHOULD NOT focus on rising the temperature of superconductors. Instead, they should try to lower the room temperature to low enough, so that all our appliances instantaneously become superconducting!







This is a joke, if somebody missed that...

24 March 2009
40 degrees below zero is cold by any measure. But, in the world of superconductors it's a record hot day. Superconductors.ORG herein reports an increase in high-Tc to 233K (-40C, -40F) through the substitution of thallium into the tin/indium atomic sites of the X212/2212C structure that produced a 218 Kelvin superconductor in January of 2009.

This is awesome.

This is awesome, indeed! -40C is ultrahigh, and I would expect it to reach 0C in nearest 10 years.

 

[GoodKat]

What if we put the superconductor and the liquid gas inside a sealed container? Then the gas wouldn't be able to evaporate!