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This new diode technology looks interesting and maybe revolutionary, Are there any opinions or projections if this is another game changer or just another technology that's decades off from being on the market and useful? If so, what would its likely first applications be? Thanks
A TU Delft team has demonstrated a one-way superconductor that gives zero resistance in one direction, but blocks current completely in the other. The discovery, long thought impossible, heralds a 400x leap in computing speed and huge energy savings.
Sounds decades off, akin to graphene and fusion and other applications. In a research stage, but worth following.
Obvious applications would be in power electronics, assuming it can be scaled up to amperes/kiloamperes... but I don't know that it would be that interesting, given that high voltages are used where any sort of high-power transmission is used. For example, let's say you have a diode with a 480Vrms system where on average the diode conducts 100A at a 2.5V drop, so a 250W loss out of something like 48kW (there might be a factor of sqrt(2) or sqrt(3) there somewhere) is significant but a small percentage... and is it worth adding the infrastructure to provide liquid nitrogen, if they can find a material with superconducting temperature above its boiling point? Plus, what happens if the cooling fails and BANG! the diodes overheat because they are no longer superconductors.
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