> transmission lines are already pretty efficient and we already choose less efficient materials for cost
You're correct, and this highlights a problem I often see in discussions: "efficiency" just is a measure of benefit/cost. Without knowing the units of benefit and cost, people aren't making meaningful statements when they say "efficient". The important efficiency of transmission lines is capacity per dollar, not capacity per material, and no material requiring lab crystallization is going to be remotely competitive in capacity per dollar.
This is an absolutely disingenuous point that compares the cost of full-economy-of-scale tech to literal one off R&D prototypes.
Maybe new technology made in a lab can one day scale up and compete against current low-cost high-scale solutions. Crazy idea, I know.
However, trying to artificially limit all discussion about R&D and future tech by claiming "it's more expensive than fully scaled solutions" has got to be full luddism. This loom prototype is too expensive! I can hire a man for a shilling a day!
> This is an absolutely disingenuous point that compares the cost of full-economy-of-scale tech to literal one off R&D prototypes.
No, even at scale, materials that you can extract from ore are inherently going to be cheaper than materials you have to extract from three different ores and then crystallize, even in a manufacturing lab. These just aren't comparable processes, and no amount of scale is ever going to fix that.
Instead of assuming I'm making a disingenuous point, you might have asked for clarification.
That's setting aside the problems others have brought up, which is that the materials in question have other properties besides conductivity which make these materials inappropriate for transmission application.
No, switching from raw aluminium to an obscure synthesised compound is not going to be worth it for a few % efficieny gain. We've had centuries of "scale up" with copper and it's still not worth it.
I'm not sure of the correct scientific language here.
As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible material so my point about the mechanical properties still stands.
And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal. Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals, except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.
> As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible material so my point about the mechanical properties still stands.
Yes. You want them to be ductile (malleable, or that can be deformed permanently in less-technical language). Although they could also be flexible (meaning that they can deform, but go back to their natural shape if we stop applying a force), as in the case of fibre optics cables, which are actually not crystals but quite brittle.
The interesting twist is that a solid pretty much has to be a crystal to be malleable. Almost all the metals you can think of are in their crystalline state.
> And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal.
I don’t know. From my experience people equate crystals with shiny things without really thinking about it. But this is HN, and we should try to be a bit better than a random person on the street. After all, most people don’t know a web browser from an OS, but I would be ridiculed if I make that confusion here.
It is a wonderful community where you are almost certain to discuss with some experts in pretty much any given field, it is a great opportunity to learn and grow.
> Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals
If you’ve seen solid aluminium, then you’ve seen it as a crystal. It is pretty much impossible with common techniques to get non-crystalline solid aluminium.
> except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.
That’s the thing, I don’t know what you think of when you say “crystal”. In actual fact, a crystal is a state of condensed matter in which atoms or ions are aligned in a 3-dimensional pattern that can be replicated to fill the space. In the case of aluminium, you can actually see how the atoms are arranged in a periodic way in articles such as this one (figure 3): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323423565_Anomalous... . There are many other examples, and it is absolutely fascinating. We have the tools to count atoms and see the structure of the material!
I am not the one deciding on terminology. In this case, both copper and aluminium are crystalline metals. Any lump of these is actually formed of a lot of smaller crystals bunched up together in what we call polycrystals. This is why they don't have the nice geometrical shapes people tend to associate with crystals in pop culture. But depending on how the material was made, these geometrical features can be seen with a magnifier or a microscope.
I am not blaming you, I know the knowledge of the general population of this sort of things is not great and you cannot know it before some tells you. A whole bunch of new age scams would completely fall apart if most people actually knew what a crystal is and where we can find them.
They are not ceramics because this is used for compounds with elements such as oxygen or nitrogen, which is not applicable here. Aluminium oxide, Al2O3, which used in sapphire "glass" in watches, is a ceramic that contains aluminium.
No, you're just the one pedantically enforcing a definition that's irrelevant to the conversation at large.
You aren't holding up your end of the conversation. Being a good listener means putting some effort into understanding what people are trying to say even if they get terminology a bit wrong. Jumping in to correct people on minor misuses of terminology doesn't show you're smart, it shows that you care more about correcting them than about their ideas.
I mean, cool, good to know copper and aluminum are crystalline metals, but the point here is that they're ductile and LK-99 isn't--you can't make wires out of LK-99. Arguing that copper and aluminum are crystals isn't adding to the conversation, it's just missing the point.
Ok, I doubt anyone is still reading this, but anyway…
> No, you're just the one pedantically enforcing a definition that's irrelevant to the conversation at large.
I am not enforcing anything. How could I, anyway? I am pointing out an error in terminology. It is far from irrelevant, all the threads about that subject are full of misinterpretations and misunderstandings. One of the reason for that is that scientific articles use the jargon of the field, which can deviate from how certain words are used in our daily lives.
> You aren't holding up your end of the conversation. Being a good listener means putting some effort into understanding what people are trying to say even if they get terminology a bit wrong. Jumping in to correct people on minor misuses of terminology doesn't show you're smart, it shows that you care more about correcting them than about their ideas.
It is not a small vocabulary issue. This stuff is fundamental materials science and you cannot understand anything about this subject if you are confused about this. Again, this thread is full of people who are confused because they don’t understand some words in the same way as the writer. Crystalline and amorphous materials have very different properties as far as conductivity is concerned. The crystalline aspect is fundamental.
> I mean, cool, good to know copper and aluminum are crystalline metals, but the point here is that they're ductile and LK-99 isn't--you can't make wires out of LK-99. Arguing that copper and aluminum are crystals isn't adding to the conversation, it's just missing the point.
What is missing the point is that we know how to make wires with brittle materials. Prime examples are silica in fibre optics and YBCO in superconducting tape. And yes, whether they are crystalline or not is very important for both of them.
In this context, they are speaking of electrical efficiency, i.e. the amount of power lost to system impedance during transmission, not some abstract concept like effectivity. The efficiency of a transmission line is expressed as a ratio of power received at one end of the line over the power sent at the other.[1]
The cost still matters because if the losses cost less to replace than the superconducting material costs to install, no one will use it. So parents point still stands. It doesn't matter how high the electrical efficiency is, what matters is cost efficiency.
This is only true to a point. Evaluating incremental cost benefits on the basis of the delta of energy loss along specific lines ignores the state change that occurs when main trunk elements of the grid become lossless and energy generation and storage solutions can be deployed in a near-location agnostic manner.
As with all toy models being applied to the real world, there are important factors to model in that aren't immediately obvious.
Who's "they"? If anyone is talking about electrical efficiency they shouldn't be because cost efficiency is what matters for a transmission line. Transmission maintainers have no reason to care if a wire transmits with 100% electrical efficiency if it's cheaper to lose some electricity than pay for the perfectly electrically-efficient wire.
You're correct, and this highlights a problem I often see in discussions: "efficiency" just is a measure of benefit/cost. Without knowing the units of benefit and cost, people aren't making meaningful statements when they say "efficient". The important efficiency of transmission lines is capacity per dollar, not capacity per material, and no material requiring lab crystallization is going to be remotely competitive in capacity per dollar.