"Instead, you're directly winding the conductor into the coil form." "The costs to wind the coils are much lower because we don't have to go through the expensive and error-prone epoxy vacuum-impregnation process," Zhai said. While simplifying construction, the technique also lowers costs. The technique means that the wires do not need conventional epoxy and glass fiber insulation to ensure the flow of electricity. These new magnets take advantage of a technique refined by Zhai and researchers at Advanced Conductor Technologies, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, in Tallahassee, Florida. So if you can shrink things in the middle, you can shrink the whole machine and reduce cost while, in theory, improving performance." "Tokamaks are sensitive to the conditions in their central regions, including the size of the central magnet, or solenoid, the shielding, and the vacuum vessel," said Jon Menard, PPPL's deputy director for research. The magnets could also help scientists continue to shrink the size of tokamaks, improving performance and reducing construction cost. Superconducting wires are also powerful, able to transmit the same amount of electrical current as a copper wire many times wider while producing a stronger magnetic field. They can be turned on for longer periods than copper magnets can because they don't heat up as quickly, making them better suited for use in future fusion power plants that will have to run for months at a time. High-temperature superconducting magnets have several advantages over copper magnets. Scientists are seeking to replicate fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of safe and clean power to generate electricity.
#Strongest magnet free#
"The only way you do that is with superconducting wires, and that's what we've done."įusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, combines light elements in the form of plasma - the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei - that generates massive amounts of energy. "To do this, you need a magnet with a stronger magnetic field and a smaller size than current magnets," said Yuhu Zhai, a principal engineer at PPPL and lead author of a paper reporting the results in IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. Since the magnets could be positioned apart from other machinery in the spherical tokamak's central cavity to corral the hot plasma that fuels fusion reactions, researchers could repair them without having to take anything else apart. Such powerful magnets would more easily fit within the tight space inside spherical tokamaks, which are shaped more like a cored apple than the doughnut-like shape of conventional tokamaks, and are being explored as a possible design for future fusion power plants. The scientists found a way to build high-temperature superconducting magnets that are made of material that conducts electricity with little or no resistance at temperatures warmer than before.
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