this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
41 points (91.8% liked)
Futurology
1743 readers
120 users here now
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Especially now that we've managed to grow them on wires. That's one of those big turning points that nobody tracked as it happened.
Can we make flexible, ductile, high-temperature super conductors now? Or have we settled for packing a flexible tube full of powder, Pixy Stix style?
Actual, flexible, ~~ductile~~ ribbons. It's a new thing just in the last few years. The key turns out to be some kind of high-energy ion beam bombardment as the crystal is growing on the ordinary metal substrate.
The pixy stix wires produced pretty crummy quality superconductor, AFAIK, besides just being harder to work with.
Edit: Actually, the HTS itself is still a ceramic, so probably not ductile. Flexible and tough, though.
Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about that, got a link for further reading?
This is the article and subsection you're looking for. IIRC you can buy like 50 feet rolls of it right now, at least on commercial scales, and the runs on the spool are gradually getting longer. An HTSC project is one of my tinkering ideas down the line, if I ever get to it, haha.