TABLE OF CONTENTS Acquaintance with the remarkable properties of superconducting materials immediately suggests their application in technology. The study of this problem began as far back as in the 1920s. It is very tempting not to lose energy in wires. It suffices to say that the energy loss in modern airliners reaches 10% and even more energy is lost in current conversion.
It is, however, not an easy task to replace all the wires with superconducting ones. The first and obvious difficulty is the low temperature required. To reach region near absolute zero is not easy and rather expensive. Many obstructions in this direction have already been overcome. For example, overheads for cooling are not very much. A more serious obstruction is the complexity of the equipment, their construction and maintenance requiring highly professional skills and advanced technology.
All the operating superconducting devices have to be thoroughly insulated from the external medium. Helium is an expensive and rare element and therefore additional external cooling by liquid nitrogen is used to lower the loss. Such double cooling makes the procedure much more complicated. From this it is already clear why so much attention has been paid to increasing the critical temperature and why the late eighties discoveries of the new materials elicited such a broad response. The discovery of the new materials will be described below and we shall now briefly outline the LTS superconducting devices already available.
The idea of a loss-free electric power line has not...
