Superconductors; Slowly moving to commercialization

This paper reports that, although progress continues in high-temperature superconductors (HTS), as reported at the Washington Materials forum and the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Ceramic Society earlier this year, the ceramics community has realized that many problems must be solved before commercialization is possible. For large-scale applications such as high-field magnetic coils, the materials must be fabricated in the form of wires or tapes with a critical current density (J{sub c}) of the order of 10{sup 5} A/cm{sup 2} in a magnetic field higher than 10 T at 77 K. They must also have a sufficient flexibility to be wound into a solenoid. A joint U.S. Research project is evaluating the technical and commercial feasibility of using such coils for small superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) systems. Combustion Engineering (Windsor, CT and the Superconductivity Pilot Center at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne, IL)) say that if shown to be feasible, small SMES systems could be used by industries, hospitals, office complexes, and shopping centers to reduce electricity costs during peak demand periods. Such systems could store electricity during periods of low demand and release it during periods of high demand, a concept known asmore » load-leveling.« less