. . .Right now, it's not the transistor size that's the limiting factor, it's the average cooling system available with the amount of thermal cooling it can provide, and the amount of power the computer can draw.
Yes. This is one of the reasons a room temperature superconductor is a holy grail type technology. There are three major applications of note.
First is power transmission lines. We lose an absurd amount of power in copper transmission lines. If this material can be mass produced as wire (which is what they’re working on), this would put an end to power loss in those lines and an enormous amount of power would then be available for new uses.
Second is computers, a 1kw rig generally dissipates all that power as heat somewhere in the system. Yeah, there’s some work that gets done but computers dissipate electric power with heat as their end product. Superconductors in the wires, in the transformers and in the transistors would eliminate so much of the dissipation that a rig that is now about 1kw would be about 150w. That’s the claim of the company working on this so don’t hold your breath but superconductors do not dissipate electricity into heat at all. So eventually these numbers will fall and fall until active cooling is not necessary at all. No fans, etc.
Third big application is electric cars. Right now, we still put the motors in the chassis, but the wheels are wasted space and that’s really where you want a motor if it can be light enough, and you can cool it properly. I think it is Mercedes-Benz who recently released a 750HP motor that weights just 38 lbs. The thing stopping such motors from easy application is they need to be cooled, so each wheel/motor needs its own cooling system complete with radiator, and that can’t be in the wheel. This requires fluids pumped to the rotor (which is stationary apart from steering) and the rotor needs to conduct heat away from the stator. This creates a very hot joint that becomes troublesome. However, if the stator is all permanent magnets and the rotor is all superconductors, there’s no heat to manage apart from secondary friction breaks like what we use now, and they will generate far less heat because the overwhelming majority of the heat generated when breaking is instead turned back into electricity and shipped to the battery.
So let’s hope this Room Temperature Superconductor really is what Cutting Edge Suoerconductors says it is.
It’s not just cars that would be impacted. They’re just the first use case. Literally ALL forms of transportation would eventually go electric if indeed a RTS can be had. Hence, “Holy Grail”.
And of special note, high temperature superconductors that need a jacket type cable carrying liquid nitrogen have been around for about 18-19 years. They’ve been tried in Uber-magnets and transmission lines. One of their interesting features is that even with the jacket, they carry far more current than the same size copper cable. So we have excellent reasons to hope this new material will likewise carry more current in a smaller package. If this is so, high current applications like all transport solutions will shrink remarkably, become more power dense, and in some instances seem to vanish in weight and size. Seriously, this is Houdini stuff to look forward to.
