Reuters reports that Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd (Tokyo:5802.T) announced plans to mass market superconductive wire. The company plans to be the first to begin mass production of cost-competitive, superconductive wire capable of transmitting 130 times the electricity deliverable by a normal copper wire.
The company claimas the breaktrough will have cost saving implications for the power industry and can be used in machinery, motors and transformers used in trains and ships.
A superconductor is a material that is a perfect conductor of electricity when it is cooled to a super-cold minus 120 degrees Celsius (minus 184 Fahrenheit). At very low temperatures, the material theoretically loses all resistance to electrical current.
Its application is currently limited to a modest niche field, such as medical diagnostics.
While scientists and global wire cable makers are competing to develop the technology, no company has brought a product to the market, said Yutaka Saeki, a spokesman at Sumitomo Electric.
"We hope the product will help boost industrial applications of superconductivity wire and other products," Saeki said.
Researchers have said that the market for such products could be worth tens of billions of dollars by 2020.
Employing know-how called "high-temperature superconductivity technology", Japan's biggest electric cable maker successfully produced 1,000-metre (3,000-foot) sections of ceramic superconductive wire, with a width less than that of a pencil.
Sumitomo has already built a volume production facility at its Osaka plant in western Japan.
Sumitomo Electric's announcement pushed up its shares by as much as 7.5 percent on a day that the Nikkei average fell 4.84 percent. The stock closed up 2.93 percent at 1,020 yen.
There are two types of superconductors — high temperature conductors, which work at temperatures of minus 200 C or above, and low temperature ones that work below that level.
Sumitomo's high-temperature superconductor — based on bismuth, a by-product of lead and zinc, and a small amount of copper — can be cooled by liquid nitrogen, a cheap industrial refrigerant.
LOW COST
The low production cost of high-temperature superconductors makes the product better suited for industrial use than the low-temperature products being used in medical imaging devices, which need to use expensive liquid helium to cool the materials below 200 C, Sumitomo said.
U.S. cable maker American Superconductor Corp (NasdaqNM:AMSC – News) is working on early-stage projects for new transmission wires in the United States but has not been able to produce section lengths as long as 1,000 metres, it said.
In order the expand the market, Sumitomo will offer the cable at competitive prices — about two to five times the price of conventional copper, Saeki said.
Sumitomo Electric expects to start marketing later this year and expects sales of one billion yen ($9.11 million) in the first full year of production.
"We don't expect profit this year, although the potential market size is great," Saeki said.
Sumitomo has already struck a deal to sell superconductive wire to U.S. power utility Niagara Mohawk Power Corp, a unit of National Grid Transco Plc (London:NGT.L – News).
The company expects the applications to expand to use in motors and transformers used in ships and trains.
The devices using the material will weigh less, helping cut energy costs in factories and on ships, Saeki said.
Other firms pursuing superconductor projects include French cable maker Nexans (Paris:NEXS.PA), the SuperPower Inc unit of Intermagnetics General Corp (NasdaqNM:IMGC) and Southwire Co of the United States.
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