A team from the University of Houston is among the 10 first-round winners for a new manufacturing prize from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The Conductivity-enhanced materials for Affordable, Breakthrough Leapfrog Electric applications (CABLE) Conductor Manufacturing Prize, a DOE initiative unveiled in March, will award up to $4.5 million to catalyze development of affordable materials to increase energy efficiency in electric devices.
The first stage of the three-stage competition sought concepts to develop and manufacture conductors with an electric conductivity enhancement seven to eight times larger than today's best copper- and aluminum-based conductors.
Enter UH's Selva Research Group, headed up by Dr. Venkat Selvamanickam, M.D. Anderson Chair professor of mechanical engineering at Cullen College of Engineering and director of the university's Advanced Manufacturing Institute. Selva Research Group's "Super Cool Conductor" is one of 10 groups to win the first round of the CABLE Prize. The group's superconductor tape is a thin wire made mostly of ceramic materials that has zero resistance to the flow of current and can be developed at a fraction of the cost of copper-based conductors.
The superconductor technology has applications in long-term energy storage, power transmission, electric transportation, medical devices and more, Selvamanickam said. The research group is focused on improving the performance of current-carrying capacity and efficiency of use of raw materials to bring down costs.
"Combine those two, [and] I think that's where we're able to get this five-fold reduction in the cost, which actually brings it to half the cost of copper wire," Selvamanickam said.
Commercialization of the patented superconductor technology is also a focus for Selvamanickam and the Selva Research Group. One vehicle for commercialization is Houston-based Ampeers LLC, Selvamanickam's startup providing consulting and research to develop new superconductor wire technologies in conjunction with UH. Ampeers has received multiple Small Business Innovation Research grants to further develop wire technologies. Additionally, external companies are able to license the tech.
Deploying this kind of superconductor tech at scale was one of the reasons Ph.D. student Mahesh Paidpilli and graduate student Siwei Chen joined Selvamanickam's team.
"I realized the broad application of this technology is limited by the cost of the material itself, so I wanted to get a further study on the material aspect," Chen said. "Dr. Selva's group is maybe the only university research group that can explore this technology and commercialize it."
Each winning team in the first round of the CABLE Prize earned a $25,000 cash prize and a stipend for third-party conductivity testing during the competition's second stage, which is taking place next year. Selvamanickam said the group will continue to provide samples of its materials for testing and independent verification in the meantime. The Super Cool Conductor was the only superconductor technology selected among the 10 first-round winners, he said.
