Pentagon Pushing Superconductive Materials : Points to Military Applications; U.S. Seen Moving Slowly in Race With Japan
The Defense Department, convinced that recent breakthroughs in superconducting materials herald a technological revolution, is moving swiftly to stimulate industrial-scale development of the new materials, senior Pentagon research officials said Wednesday.
Among the potential military applications of superconductors now under investigation is an ultralight and quiet propulsion system for nuclear submarines that could double a vessel’s speed and weapons load while reducing its weight by half, an official of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency told a House committee.
At the same time, President Reagan’s science adviser, William R. Graham, said that the White House will hold a national conference in Washington on July 28 and 29 to enable government research agencies, universities and private industry to discuss how best to compete with Japan and Western Europe in the race to move the new superconductors out of the laboratory and into the marketplace.
Compared to Transistor
In a hearing before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Graham noted that the new superconductors--ceramic materials that lose their resistance to electricity at commercially attainable temperatures--are “as potentially important as the invention of the transistor” in the 1950s, which opened the way to today’s computer revolution.
However, a research manager with the IBM Corp. cautioned that mass-producing these materials in usable forms such as wire and thin, spray-on films poses a difficult challenge to materials science. Praveen Chaudhari, vice president of science at IBM’s research division in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., said that his own firm has made significant progress but that “we did not invent rockets one day and walk on the moon the next.”
“We are still a long way from bringing products to the market which employ superconducting technology. And it’s easy to lose sight of this in the excitement of such a highly competitive environment,” Chaudhari told the House committee.
The phenomenon of superconductivity was discovered in 1911 by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who found that some metals lost their resistance to electricity at temperatures near absolute zero, the lowest temperature theoretically possible.
Powerful Magnets
Recent decades brought the discovery of exotic and expensive niobium metal alloys that become superconductive at slightly higher temperatures. This has led to the development of powerful superconducting magnets, but the cost of the materials and the difficulty of cooling them ruled out most commercial applications.
Then, in January, 1986, Karl Alex Muller, at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland, found a new class of materials--ceramic metal oxides--that became superconductive at much higher temperatures. Muller touched off a global race to produce superconductivity at still higher temperatures that has led to dramatic gains at an unprecedented pace.
“The breakthroughs are coming so fast,” Graham said, “you need a score card to keep up.”
As theoreticians struggle to explain why the new materials behave as they do, experimenters have pushed the threshold of superconductivity well above the temperature of cheap and commercially available liquid nitrogen.
New Super-Computers
This advance has raised the promise of a vast array of applications, from ultra-efficient propulsion systems for ships to a new generation of super-computers and major strides in medical diagnostics.
In Wednesday’s hearing, several members of Congress said that the Administration appears to be moving lethargically to facilitate research and development by industry, even though a race is on with Japan to move the new materials into the market.
“From my point of view, we’ve seen precious little action,” Rep. Dave R. Nagle (D-Iowa) said, in a view that seemed widely shared by the committee.
However, defense officials said that a major effort is under way to develop commercial manufacturing processes for the new superconductors, which would benefit both civilian industry and the military.
Craig I. Fields, deputy director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said his agency already has redirected funds to half a dozen of its current ceramics suppliers to explore ways of producing the materials, contracted with half a dozen other firms to join the search and has begun a “major new procurement action” through the Office of Naval Research.
Fields said that his agency expects to receive “several hundred” research and development proposals no later than July from industrial firms, universities and the federal government’s own national laboratories for a superconductor development program that will amount to “several tens of millions of dollars” in fiscal 1988, which begins Oct. 1.
A major goal of the program, he said, is to develop small pilot production lines, or “boutique factories,” that can turn out superconducting ceramics wire, tape and thin films applicable to magnets, motors and high-speed microelectronic components, and do so in three to four years.
Could Launch Missiles
As examples of potential military applications, Fields cited the new submarine propulsion system and a form of “electromagnetic launchers” that could be used in the Administration’s space-defense program, popularly known as “Star Wars.” Using magnets with a power achievable only with superconducting materials, the launchers would propel anti-missile warheads that destroy their targets by force of impact at speeds approaching 7,000 m.p.h.
“We feel a sense of urgency, both because Defense needs the capabilities promised by the new materials and because we know our adversaries are devoting considerable resources to achieve their own technology base in high-temperature superconductors--both directly and indirectly,” Fields said in a reference to the Soviet Union.
