June 13th Dr. Amit Goyal presents High Temperature Superconductors: From Discovery to Large-Scale Industrial Applications

Remember high-temperature superconductors? These high-tech darlings of the late 1980s brought a Nobel Prize to their discoverers and generated endless speculation about how their near perfect conduction of electricity would revolutionize the world we live in! A key obstacle in realizing large-scale applications of these novel materials was the difficulty of forming long, flexible wires that can carry large amounts of supercurrent per unit area, from these highly brittle, ceramic superconductors that essentially resemble “mud”.It turns out that from a technical or performance standpoint, a mile-long, flexible, single-crystal-like wire of the highly brittle, ceramic superconductor was required. From a cost and fabrication standpoint, an industrially scalable, low-cost process was needed with the goal being to meet or beat the price of ordinary copper wire! This constituted the first holy-grail in fabrication of high-performance, superconducting wires, namely, fabrication of single-crystal-like superconducting wires by the kilometer at a price/performance metric equivalent to that of copper. Once this seemingly insurmountable objective was addressed via fundamental technical innovations, a second holy-grail became apparent for realizing large-scale applications where high-applied magnetic fields were present. This related to substantially improving the vortex-pinning within the superconducting wires which could only be accomplished by introducing periodic, nanoscale, non-superconducting regions separated by nanoscale dimensions, within kilometer-long superconducting wires. Of course, all of this had to be accomplished without adding any significant cost! In this talk Professor Amit Goyal of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo will take you on a journey from the discovery of high temperature superconductors towards realizing practical, large-scale, applications of these novel materials by addressing the key scientific and technical challenges mentioned above. The eventual solutions are one of the first, large-scale, high-technology applications of nanotechnology, the only example of "epitaxy-by-the-mile" and of self-assembly of nanomaterials by the mile! These HTS wires are now enabling commercial nuclear fusion for limitless clean energy generation, loss-less transmission of energy, superconducting magnetic energy storage systems, next-generation MRI and NMR, MagLev for transportation and all-electric planes and ships with superconducting drivetrains for defense applications.

Dr. Amit Goyal is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo; a Member of US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Inventors; a Fellow of AAAS, MRS, IEEE, APS, ASM, ACERS, IOP, WIF and WTN; and a Member of the US National Materials and Manufacturing Board (NMMB). He has co-authored over 360 publications and has 85 issued patents. He was ranked by Thompson-Reuters as the most cited author worldwide in the field of high temperature superconductors from 1999-2009. He is the Director of the Lab for Heteroepitaxial Growth of Functional Materials and Devices, and the Director of the NYS Center of Plastics Recycling Research and Innovation at SUNY. He served as the Founding Director of the Institute on Research and Education on Energy, Environment and Water (2015-21), and is an Emeritus Corporate Fellow at the Oak Ridge National Lab. He has received numerous accolades including DOE’s E.O. Lawrence (EOL) Award in the inaugural category of Energy Science and Innovation. The EOL award is given by the DOE Secretary on behalf of the President. Selected additional honors include: TEN R and D 100 awards, the R and D Magazine's "Innovator-of-the-Year" award (2010), Three National Federal Lab Consortium Awards for Tech. Transfer, and the SUNY-Buffalo President’s Medal (2019), the. highest award at the University at Buffalo.