Abstract
Moderately priced electricity for industry and commerce, with minimal climate changing emissions, is integral to the continued development of a stable world society. Economies of scale applied to cost-effective clean energy resources can achieve appropriate prices, but suitable resources are often far from users, requiring safe, reliable, low-cost, low loss, long-distance, environmentally acceptable transmission lines.
Superconducting lines can be used, but they are currently precluded by excessive cost and inadequate reliability. Advances beyond the present state of the art of additive manufacture, and lower operating temperatures with helium coolant can enable construction of practical superconducting transmission systems.
As a first step, short corrugated cylindrical shell conduit sections have been built in titanium, steel, and aluminium alloys by Selective Laser Melting.
Development of an additive manufacturing technology for substantial build lengths is thus on a pathway to the goal of world-wide electric energy supply with near zero emissions.
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Sheehy, I. (2015). A Pathway to Near Zero Emission Electric Energy Through Additive Manufacture of Superconducting Electric Transmission Conduits. In: Fergus, J.W., Mishra, B., Anderson, D., Sarver, E.A., Neelameggham, N.R. (eds) Engineering Solutions for Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48138-8_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48138-8_24
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