A superconductor is an element or metallic alloy which, when cooled below a certain threshold temperature, completely loses all its electrical resistance. Thus, superconductors can allow electrical current to flow without any energy loss due to ideally zero resistance. But in practice, an ideal superconductor is very hard to manufactured. Hence very high conductivity materials made by the above principle, so named as superconductors. There are huge applications of superconductors.
Superconductors are indeed perfect conductor that has zero resistance. It doesn’t just have very low resistance and conducts electricity well, but it has absolutely ZERO resistance and conducts electricity perfectly with no losses at all. In theory if you had a super conductor material it could be infinitely thin and infinitely long. Imagine a thin strand of 30 gauge wire carrying all the electricity used in the USA. That is possible with a super conductor.
Super conductor behavior is typically seen only near absolute zero which is really cold at -273 degrees centigrade which is 460 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Better put on your long underwear for that. Minor detail, you can get close to absolute zero but so far it’s been impossible to get all the way to absolute zero. Fortunately some materials become super conductors at achievable temperatures that are slightly above absolute detail.
So why haven’t we seen super conductors in practical applications? Well, you need an electrical insulator and you need a thermal insulator around the super conductor. So far there isn’t much luck finding a perfect insulator, so a little heat leaches through any insulation, so must continually cool the material. You can cool a super conductor material in the lab but it isn’t practical across spans of distances like power lines. As usual, the devil is in the detail.
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