Technology Trending: superconductor breakthrough, zebra skin energy harvesting, energy island
A superconductor at ambient temperature and near-ambient pressure, a zebra skin-inspired thermoelectric generator for wearables and Elia’s North Sea energy island are on this week’s technology radar.
Dawn of ambient superconductivity
Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York believe that a new era of superconductivity is in sight, with their development of a material that is superconductive at both ambient temperatures and near ambient pressures low enough for practical applications.
The material, a nitrogen doped lutetium hydride (NDLH), exhibits superconductivity at 20oC and 10kbar.
Up to now superconductivity generally requires extreme temperatures, colder than 200oC, although high temperature superconductors have been demonstrated at a temperature approaching 0oC but with coupled with extreme pressure.
Have you read?
Superconductivity tech to deliver up to 10x more renewable capacity
Collaboration will unlock North Sea wind potential says Trine Borum Bojsen of Equinor
“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” according to research team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of physics.
Superconducting materials have two key properties – no electrical resistance and expelled magnetic fields that pass around the material.
This makes them suitable for a wide range of applications such as lossless electricity transmission grids, hyperloop trains and magnetic confinement of plasmas in tokamak fusion machines.
Rare earth metal hydrides such as lutetium hydride form specific cage-like molecular structures, with the nitrogen adding to its stability and enabling the superconductivity to occur at lower pressure.
Further work is still required to understand the superconducting state of the material. The research team also envisage harnessing machine learning with their accumulated experimental data to sift through thousands of other combinations of rare earth metals to predict other possible superconducting materials.
‘Zebra skin’ thermoelectric generator
Taking inspiration from the stripes on the back of the zebra, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology researchers have developed a novel thermoelectric generator for energy harvesting that is flexible, soft and ultimately biodegradable.
Whereas conventional thermoelectric generators are bulky and rigid as they require out-of-plane heating and cooling areas to create a temperature difference, the ‘zebra skin’ design utilises alternate black and white stripes made with a combination of layers of polymer materials, the white to reflect the sunlight and the black to absorb it and thereby create the gradient.
According to the researchers, who included an array of silicon nanomembranes for the electricity conversion, their design was able to generate a maximum temperature difference of 22oC along with a maximum energy density of 6µW/m2.
Moreover, the device was completely biodegraded without any remaining by-products within just 35 days.
With the nature of their design, the researchers expect that it can be incorporated into flexible and wearable devices for power generation as well as other applications such as sensing.
“It can also be integrated seamlessly into various energy and smart grid technologies to further enhance their functionality and impact,” says Professor Young Min Song, who led the research.
What the first ‘energy island’ will look like
The Belgian Elia Group’s plans to build an energy island in the North Sea are gathering momentum with the recent award of the engineering, procurement, construction and installation (EPCI) contract to the DEME and Jan De Nul groups, both global players in marine construction.
The Princess Elisabeth Island, which is set to be the first of a series of ‘islands’ in the North Sea serving as hubs for the planned mega-capacity of offshore wind, will be located about 45km off the Belgian coast and will serve as the link between the up to 3.5GW of wind capacity in the zone and Elia’s onshore HV grid and via the new interconnections Nautilus with the UK and TritonLink with Denmark.
Its area is proposed to be about 6ha and the island will be constructed from concrete caissons filled with sand.
The island will mainly house transmission infrastructure that will be linked to the new wind farms, while a small harbour and helicopter pad are planned for visits by maintenance teams.
Construction of the island is due to start in early 2024 and it should be completed by mid-2026. From then on, the construction of the electrical infrastructure will start, with the full connection capacity of the wind farms anticipated by 2030.
