The Los Alamos-developed technology allows superconducting materials to be deposited onto a flat-formed tape that serves as a wire that can be made into cables and coils. Those can be used in motors, generators, transformers, transmission lines, fault current controllers that prevent lightening strikes from burning out controllers, and energy-storage devices that allow energy to be stored when demand is low and used when demand goes up.
The tape, one-tenth the thickness of a human hair, can carry more than 100 amperes per centimeter width -- which is 100 times the amount of current (or electric power) that can be carried through an equivalent area of copper wire.
High-temperature superconductor materials carry electrical currents without any resistance, or loss of energy, when cooled with liquid nitrogen. Since the discovery of these materials' superconducting properties in the late 1980s, researchers have sought ways to produce flexible wires or tapes from the normally brittle substances for use in electric motors, transformers and magnetically levitated trains. For years it was the Holy Grail of superconductivity science. In 1995 a Los Alamos team developed a method of depositing a superconducting ceramic known as yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO, on inexpensive nickel alloy tape by first applying a buffer layer of cubic zirconia. This layer of zirconia imposes the crystalline alignment necessary for the YBCO to maintain superconductivity.
Researchers deposit the zirconia layer using two ion beams in a process known as Ion Beam Assisted Deposition. The first beam removes material from a zirconia target and deposits it on the nickel tape. The second ion beam, aimed at the tape, orients the zirconia grains as they are deposited. A subsequent pulsed-laser deposition of YBCO film -- a mere one millionth of a meter thick -- on top of the aligned zirconia allows the YBCO grains to mimic the crystalline alignment of the zirconia buffer, which improves the tape's superconducting properties.
Los Alamos scientists have demonstrated the HTS tape works in short lengths -- up to one meter long. IGC-SuperPower intends to manufacture kilometer-long HTS tapes with the same superconducting properties and make this technology commercially available.
The technology licensed to IGC-SuperPower is the second generation of HTS tape and has superior superconducting properties -- it will carry more current as compared to the first generation of HTS tape that is already commercially available.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and the Washington Division of URS for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.