Superconducting motor

Flexible superconducting tapes provide promise of uses for superconductors in motors, generators, and even electric transmission lines. Meanwhile, superconducting magnets cooled to the temperature of liquid helium already are in use. High-field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers have become standard instruments in chemical research laboratories, and the same type of machine (called an MRI spectrometer) is used for medical diagnosis in hospitals worldwide. 

In 1996, a 50 m underground superconducting cable (wound from 6 km of a BSCCO ribbon) and a 150 kW superconducting electric motor were successfully demonstrated. Further development of practical superconductor devices might well depend more on the development of suitable refrigeration technology than on the preparation of new superconducting materials. 

Superconductivity Products Power Electronic Switches SMES Systems Electric Motors Generators Superconducting Materials Electric Transmission Cables Nanodots... 

The navy s approach to superconducting ships is far different from Saji s. While the ST-500 bootstraps itself along using seawater as the power fluid, the craft the navy has christened Jupiter II runs on a superconductive motor which drives a propeller. Moreover, the ST-500 is a model that has done its tricks only in a test tank. Jupiter II, with a 400-HP motor and generator (later upgraded to 3,000 HP), was the first vessel in history to be propelled at sea by a completely superconducting electric drive system. 

Superconducting elements, as this comparison of motors demonstrates, make for a smaller and lighter shipboard engine. 

In all superconducting machinery, you really have one different thing—and that is that all of these machines consist of magnetic fields that are generated by turns of wire, which is essential to making a motor really work. The difference between a normal machine and a superconducting... 

A cutaway view of the Jupiter II showing the components of a propulsion system which uses a superconducting DC motor. (Drawing courtesy U. S. Navy s David Taylor Research Center.)... 

Can these superconducting motors and bearings be combined to create that nonpolluting, quiet, simple-starting dream vehicle, the electric car Perhaps. Room-temperature superconductors seem to be close at hand, and engineers have been able to build smaller motors and chassis with lighter materials, and space-age fuel cells that are similar to batteries but which draw their energy from a chemical fuel that is supplied while the cell is in use. 

Meissner motor An electric motor developed at Argonne National Laboratory, its operating principle is based on the Meissner effect and it uses superconducting ceramic disks. 

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