I Superconductivity energy saved v Cooling/Heating energy loss

[giodude]

Hi!

In reading about Superconductivity and its current state of only being achieved in super cooled or heated materials. This sparked a question the following question:
What is the result of the trade off between energy saved by avoiding dissipation through the natural resistance of a material and energy spent on cooling/heating and maintaining a material in a superconducting state?

I haven't been able to find any answers or experiments that measure this tradeoff so:
(a) I'm curious if has ideas about how the gain and loss compare.
(b) Are there studies that have been conducted to test this tradeoff?

Thank you!

 

[berkeman]

In reading about Superconductivity and its current state of only being achieved in super cooled or heated materials.

Yeah, that heated superconductivity stuff is pretty cool, eh? (oh sorry)

This sparked a question the following question:
What is the result of the trade off between energy saved by avoiding dissipation through the natural resistance of a material and energy spent on cooling/heating and maintaining a material in a superconducting state?

I haven't been able to find any answers or experiments that measure this tradeoff

Yeah, Google is pretty lame with this search. You show me your search terms and I'll show you mine...

 

[Vanadium 50]

I don't think there is a general formula applicable to all cases. As you point out, you save power, but you also use power in your fridge. High energy physics experiments sometimes use conventional magnets and sometimes superconducting magnets. So they are kind of on the borderline.

 

[f95toli]

it is a very open ended questions. In most cases superconductors are used simply because it is not possible to do the same thing using normal materials; not because someone is trying to save energy.
That said, there are studies trying to e.g., compare the energy used by a supercomputer and a supercomputing quantum computer to perform the same calculation. These are obviously mostly hypothetical for now since we don't yet have practical quantum computers; but typically the predicted power consumption used by the cooling system isn't actually very high (a few tens of kW, a big supercomputers uses MW of energy); the power consumption of the needed room temperature instrumentation can easily be higher.

Also, the compressor in the cooling system for a modern cryostat uses somewhere around 5-7 kW; most systems only need one compressor (occasionally two) so that would be the power consumption of a typical device/machine (not counting facilities such as particle accelerators)

 

[Nik_2213]

'Grid Links' should be easier to account, as eg 'traditional' underground links already require active cooling, plus overheads such as conversion equipment. IIRC, given resistive losses are I^2*R (RMS), there's a big incentive to transfer power at highest practicable voltage to reduce current required. At cost of converting to/from higher voltage and installing / maintaining the cable, of course. With minimal resistive loss in a superconducting cable, a lower voltage may be cost effective, so reducing that factor...