Monday, September 01, 2008
The nation's power grid loses 7% or 16$ billion worth of its energy each year during power transmission and redistribution. A recent way to improve this without expensive supercooling has been devised, a bit of the electricity is rerouted to electric cooler insulators around the outside of each wire, as if a one way valve inward to hold the heat. The cooling makes it so the power flows with reduced resistance and power loss, and the inward flow of the field also is used. The goal has been to create supercooled flow so no power is lost. Copper or aluminum wires heat up and radiate while an empty field has the least heat loss because without friction or heating not as much heat is radiant. To perhaps achieve Edison's old dream power may be beamed between microwave collectors on high or lasers inside mirrored tubes. Even so tubes to carry the power with no matter inside them might have the problem of leaks of the power from inside the mirrored walls of the wire. A vacuum is a poor conductor by convection or conduction because of no other molecules there but a good conductor of radiation. Thus a low density wire with a mirrored inner outer layer may be of worth. The mirror is easier to stop heat loss than by insulation other than electric insulation and if combined with it. A lower density solid that may be of worth is an airogel, the lightest solid and the engineer L.M. Smith says this would be used to both stop leaks by absorbing much of the power with an outer layer while allowing reduced heat loss in common use. Like a sponge there would be a slower leak if damaged like by unraveled wire but not so much as a complete loss of power and pressure of a tubular wire while at the same time in common use much more radiant power would be saved. Halleluighah, I Sure Have faith I can't spell!