The promise of superconductivity for electrical power transmission and transportation has long been held back by high costs. Now researchers from the University of Houston and Germany have demonstrated a way to cut the cost and upend both the transit and energy transport sectors by using superconductors to move people, cargo and energy along existing highway infrastructure.
The combined system would not only lower the cost of operating each system but would also provide a way to store and transport liquified hydrogen, an important future source of clean energy. The liquified hydrogen would be used to cool the superconductor guideway as it is stored and transported, reducing the need for a separate specialized pipeline system capable of cooling the fuel to 20 degrees Kelvin, or minus 424 Fahrenheit.
The concept, described in a paper published in April in the journal APL Energy, suggests a future in which air travel and traditional freight transport could become obsolete, replaced by a “super system” allowing personal and commercial vehicles to travel at speeds up to 400 miles an hour – maybe even twice that fast.
“I call it a world-changing technology,” said Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, who came up with the concept and is a corresponding author on the paper. “Superconductivity has had such promise to transmit electric power without power loss, to power magnetically levitating, super-fast trains and for energy storage. But it has not been economically viable, which is why it hasn’t happened at large scale yet.”
The modern era of superconductivity research began in 1987, when a team led by UH physicist Paul Chu discovered a compound which acted as a superconductor at a temperature above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. Since then, demonstration projects have proven that superconductors can be used to power magnetically levitated trains and to transmit electrical power without energy loss, reducing waste.
Magnetically levitating trains traditionally operate on a magnetized rail, with superconductors embedded in the train undercarriage. This concept flips that, embedding superconductors into the existing highway infrastructure and adding magnets to the undercarriages of vehicles, which avoids having to cool the superconductors on each vehicle. Instead, the liquified hydrogen would cool the superconductors as it moves across the system, with liquified nitrogen and a vacuum layer used to thermally insulate the liquified hydrogen.
AR #116
The Lost Arts of Levitation
by Steve Richards
