Rosie Thompson.

Word count 1264

Is it a Bird? Is it A Plane? No, its a Superconductive Maglev Train (Just what is so super about Superconductors?) With earths diminishing fossil fuel supply there is a global race to discover or create a clean source of energy. One promising contribution is the use of superconductors which in many ways are the closest thing to the perpetual motion machines dreamt about by scientists, science fiction fans and fantasists for generations. This remarkable technology has huge implications for the future. Having seen a superconductor in action at the Wellcome collection as part of their interactive Elements exhibition I can recall how the crowd were dumbstruck while watching a disk levitating above a metal hoop shrouded in the theatrical, smoky appearance of liquid nitrogen. A Superconductive century Superconductivity was discovered In April 1911 by Dutch Physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, making last year the centenary of this amazing discovery. Onnes was studying the resistivity of metals at low temperatures as it had long been known that electrical conductivity was improved by cooling. In studying the resistance of mercury in its solid form when cooled to the temperature of liquid Helium, suddenly its resistance vanished completely. Like any good scientist Onnes repeated this experiment time and time again, always getting the same results. At around 4 Kelvin (-269.15C), the Mercury conducted electricity without losing any charge. Later, Onnes and his colleagues discovered that Lead lost all resistance at around 7 Kelvin (266.15C). Onnes won the Nobel Prize in 1913. While most elements are conductors, insulators or semi-conductors, about a quarter of the known elements go superconducting as is shown in the table below:-

An exciting example of a superconducting element is Oxygen. At pressures of around 100 GPa (Giga Pascals) and with a temperature of 0.6 Kelvin, Oxygen becomes metallic. This is characterised by an increase in optical reflectivity and a change in the slope of the resistance-temperature curve on a graph. Critical Temperatures and the Effects of Superconductivity At normal temperatures superconductors are unresponsive with no magnetic power at all, but under the right conditions they take on very special qualities. For example, by adding liquid nitrogen (which is -196 C or 77 Kelvin) to a particular type of High Temperature Superconductor the liquid nitrogen boils on the unresponsive surface. When the boiling ceases the nitrogen and Superconductor are said to be in Thermal Equilibrium. At this temperature, when a magnet approaches, the superconductor is repelled. This is known as the Meissner effect. When the magnet is pushed towards the surface of the superconductor, the magnet is both attracted and repelled in what is known as Flux Trapping Effect. This is when magnetic levitation and magnetic suspension are able to take place and if set in motion, a spinning, levitating magnet will continue spinning indefinitely. Overcoming Limitations Although scientists have come on leaps and bounds in understanding superconductivity, and although so called high temperature Superconductors have been discovered and developed, the TC (critical temperatures) of these is still very low- in the region of 90 K (183C) to 77 K (-196 C) meaning a substantial amount of energy is still needed to cool the superconducting material sufficiently. Also, high temperature Superconductors, are extremely brittle meaning that without further modification they are totally impractical for use in anything requiring flexibility such as cables. As such, alloys are fabricated in order to get around the unyielding nature of high temperature superconductors. One method of manufacturing these alloys is the PIT (Powder in Tube) method. Powder, such as MgB2 (Magnesium Diboride) is poured into a tube made of a metal such as Silver or copper, which in turn is pulled through a draw-plate with increasingly smaller apertures until an extremely thin wire is produced. This can then be used to build cables by joining filaments togetheras is used at CERN- or flattened to create a flexible tape.

Applications At the moment superconductors are an essential part of Medical Imaging scanners, SQUIDs (used for detecting mines and submarines), and particle accelerators. Superconductors are also used in high speed railway travel as Maglev (short for Magnetic Levitation) trains silently carry passengers through Germany and Japan. In addition to the superfast destination time the electric current loses no power like conventional electricity flow due to the fact that once cooled to the transitional temperature, superconductors have exactly zero electrical resistance thus making them a potential economical, ecological godsend. At present Maglev trains can reach speeds of around 500mph but in a low pressure tunnel vehicles could travel at thousands of miles per hour. This is because air drag- which is proportional to the cube of the vehicles speed- would effectively be reduced to zero in such a tunnel. To put this into perspective, it could soon be possible to take a train from London into the heart of Russia (around 2600 miles away), in just over an hour on the equivalent of a gallon of petrol. Possibly the most exciting use of superconductors is the Maglev water train. According to the United Nations, around half the global population lives in areas where obtaining clean water is an everyday struggle. There is often a surplus in one region and drought in another region within the same country. In Somalia and other areas in East Africa for example more than 30% of children are malnourished, and out of every 10,000, four children are dying daily. This famine is largely due to drought. In many areas, fossil water has been mined from underground reservoirs and not replaced by rainfall, causing wells to dry up. To overcome this crisis there are very limited options. Desalination is prohibitively expensive and pipelines need large amounts of pumping power and are unsuitable for hilly rolling terrains. The Maglev water train would be able to transport water over large distances at much smaller cost than the alternatives, it would be suitable for the terrains that pipes couldnt traverse and capable of supplying 100 million people with 20 gallons of water every day over a distance of 500 miles. This would cost approximately 60 pence per 4500 litres compared with 3.60 for desalination of the same amount of water. As an additional bonus, in areas where there is 1 meter of downgrade per kilometre of terrain, the cost of transporting water in this way could be as little as 40 pence per 4500 litres. This is due to the way the train converts automatically between Kinetic Energy and Gravitational Potential Energy. In order to achieve this very low cost of transportation the water train would need to carry 4 or 5 times the weight of a passenger or freight train which in theory would be no problem because magnetic levitation would effectively render the train weightless.

Conclusion Superconductors could change the shape of things to come for the better. They could be a major part of solving or at least lessening the burden placed on the earth by over-mining of fossil fuels and uneven distribution of vital resources to the people that need them the most in our overpopulated world. Whether or not we make use of this ever-expanding technology in any major way will depend on the investing power of the developed world. To loosen their grip on the purse strings, the powers that be will want to know there is something in the way of a financial return for such enormous outlay as would be required to implement the necessary changes. The returns on financial investment may not be overnight but as a race, humans could all reap the rewards of a cleaner, greener future. References What is superconductivity? www.isciencemag.co.uk (4 March 2012) Science 1001 -Absolutely everything you need to know about science in 1001 bite-sized explanations (Page 46) Paul Parsons (Quercus Publishing Plc, 2010) Physics (chapter 20, Condensed Matter) Ken Dobson, David Grace and David Lovett (Collins Advanced Science third edition) UN declares Somalia famine in Bakool and Lower Shabelle www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa (20 July 2011) High temperature Superconductors 1 (from eequalsmcsquared.auckland.ac.nz) www.youtube.com (December 2011) How superconducting levitation works www.youtube.com (2007) Superconductivity in Oxygen www.nature.com (Letters to Nature 25 June 1998) Maglev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_train The Water Train

www.maglev2000.com/apps/apps-04.html (2001) Periodic Table www.superconductors.org