Work in pairs or small groups. Read the text and brainstorm some ideas for possible uses of superconductivity in the near future

Applications of superconductivity

What's so good about superconductivity? Yes, you can make little bits of ceramics float if you make them really cold, but what else can you do? Imagine if we could make a material that was superconducting at room temperature. Our computers would work faster because they'd allow electric currents to flow more easily. We could make powerful electromagnets that turned electricity into magnetism without wasting anything like as much energy. That would mean electric appliances in our homes and offices would waste much less power. We could also make "Maglev" (magnetic levitation) trains that would float on rails using linear motors and get us around with a fraction of the power used by current locomotives. Engineers are already trying to use superconductors in all these ways, but if they could find a really high-temperature superconductor (one that worked at about 0–20°C (32–68°F or 273–293K), their job would be an awful lot easier!

Called superconductivity this discovery remained without practical applications for decades.

But nowadays superconductors are already used in many fields: electricity, medical applications, electronics and even trains. They are used in laboratories, especially in particle accelerators, in astrophysics in ultrasensitive magnetic detectors called SQUIDs and in superconducting coils to produce very strong magnetic fields.

However, they need to be cooled to very low temperatures, and this fact restricts their use in our everyday life. But new applications are already operational in laboratories and will be able to spread to our cities and our homes if the cooling process becomes less expensive or, better, if we discover superconducting materials that do not require any cooling. If this happens, we can expect an actual revolution in energies and environment on the one side and transportation and computer science on the other.

 

When you have finished, compare your ideas with your group, or the rest of the class.

Which were the most popular ideas? Have a group vote on the best idea of all.

Find someone who…

1 generated the most ideas

2 suggested the most practical ideas

3 had the most ambitious ideas

4 resisted new ideas

5 is good at improvising and coming up with new ideas

 

55. Work in pairs. Student A: Read the facts and figures about applications of superconductivity.

Student B: Read your version of the facts and figures on page 25

Ask your partner questions to complete the missing information in your text.

Student A:

1 One of the biggest successes in the recent past is the production of a flexible yttrium-barium-copper-oxide tape, created in ________(when?).

2 Electricity has become an essential energy source in our modern lives. However, today’s power cables can only carry limited currents _________(why?). A network of ________(what?) would solve this problem because 1000 times more electric current can flow through them: smaller cables with more currents.

3 Superconductors can also be used to make a device known as s uperconducting q uantum i nterference d evice (SQUID). This is incredibly sensitive to small magnetic fields so that it can detect the magnetic fields from the heart (10 -10) and even the brain (10-13 Tesla). For comparison, the Earth’s magnetic field is about 10 -4 Tesla. As a result, SQUIDs are used in medical diagnostics on the brain.

4 A use of large and powerful superconducting electromagnets is in a possible future energy source known as nuclear fusion. An international fusion energy project, known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is currently being built in the south of France that will use large superconducting magnets and is due for completion in 2017.