Room temp superconductors soon to come

Separate research groups in the U.S. and Europe are polishing a theory called "critical states," which brings about the possibility of making room-temperature superconductors a reality. The theory supports that critical states as not fixed temperatures backed up by experimental results, and the highest temperature superconductor yet has been proven to be depend on quantum effects that open the possibility of optimising compounds for room-temperature operation.

"The 'critical state model' has had continued success since circa 1963. One of its rock-solid predictions is that in order to magnetize a piece of bulk superconducting material to its maximum obtainable field, one must apply a field exceeding 2X that maximum," professor Roy Weinstein told EE Times. "The actual factor is almost always larger than 2, and depends upon the geometry of the bulk. Most typically, for bulks used in applications, the factor is 3.2X. The magnetized bulk superconductor then acts like a permanent magnet, called a "trapped field magnet" (TFM)."

In Weinstein's experiments, however, his group has shown readily applicable circumstances under which the bulk is fully activated by an applied field only equal to the permanently magnetized state (1X).

"Our experiments show many other interesting results, but these are of interest mostly to physicists rather than engineers," Weinstein told EE Times. "There are very fast increases in field penetration into the superconductors. These are greater than 100 times faster than allowed by CSM. Also the heat generated in the activation process has limited all previous activation methods, but in the newly discovered circumstances, exceptionally little heat is generated."

Weinstein's group's new formulation of superconducting theory, also has allowed them to build superconducting motors and generators which are more than 16X as powerful for the same size, or conversely could be 16-time smaller that equivalent superconducting motors and generators today.

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