#90🚀 BONUS: Superconductor LK-99 in Magnetics
SuperPowers for Electrical Engineers 🦸🏻♂️🦸🏼♀️
👋 Hello, friends! Dr. Molina here 👨🔧
I couldn´t resist discussing this topic because I’m very excited to learn more about LK-99!! I know we are very far from an actual application of LK-99 in Electronics, but… let's dream about it!
Before entering the article, let me remind you this is the kind of conversation we want to have at Mag & Mad.
I really encourage you to plan your trip to Madrid in September to join us at Mag & Mad
How would the world be if we could decrease 1700 times the energy losses?
The World might be changing if the SuperConductor LK-99 is doing what the Scientific Sukbae Lee and his team in Korea published one week ago. The implications could be huge in energy management. Let me explain why.
I’m not an expert at Superconductors; I’m an expert at Electronics, where we use Cooper to transfer energy from point Generation (Ex: Solar Panel) to point the device that needs it (Ex: Your Laptop or owen)
The Electric Energy travels through thousands of km of cooper and three magnetic transformers to adjust the voltage and current (Ex: your phone charges at 5V and 3A = 15 W)
During the process of sending the energy from the generation to your device, we lose energy for three phenomenons:
80% are Cooper Losses - Resistivity of 1,68 x 10-8 Ω m
15% Switching Losses - There are a lot of switches in each conversion stage
5% Magnetic Core Losses - Magnetic Materials lose energy in their magnetization process
The resistivity of a Superconductor, by definition, is 10-8 Ω m, which is translated to 1700 times less conduction losses. I have calculated conduction losses for both cases.
Impact on the Magnetics
But let's focus on the Magnetic components. They are based on a Magnetic Core and Cooper if we check the losses in these components.
As we can see, the impact of the winding losses in a typical inductor could be very relevant. There are two types of winding losses: DC and AC losses.
But…what if we will have LK-99 with a meager DC resistance? What would we do differently?
My first draft:
DC losses are not important anymore. Therefore, I can have infinite turns to decrease the core losses.
However, theAC losseswon´t disappear because they are related to electric fields opposing the circulation of the current through the conductor and more turns, layers, and higher losses.We must find an optimal design to balance AC and core losses.For High-Frequency inductors, I would use a single-layer winding with smaller wires and add enough distance between wires to reduce AC losses.
What do you think?
I was wrong…in an ideal case, AC losses will also disappear….check my next NL for my second draft…
References
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008
[2] https://www.pes-publications.ee.ethz.ch/uploads/tx_ethpublications/workshop_publications/___PSMA_Magnetics_Workshop_Keynote_JWK_FINALFINALFINAL_190417.pdf