UH-led team receives $3.1 million DOE award to develop superconducting wire for wind turbines

The University of Houston will lead a public-private research team that has been awarded $3.1 million by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a low-cost superconducting wire that could be used to power future wind turbines.

This support is part of the DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, which recently announced it has awarded $156 million to 60 cutting-edge research projects designed to improve how the U.S. produces and uses energy.

UH, in conjunction with SuperPower Inc., the DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Tai-Yang Research and TECO-Westinghouse Motor Company, will develop an efficient, low-cost high-temperature superconducting wire (HTS) to use in future advanced wind turbine generators. This breakthrough technology is a key enabling technology for other electromagnetic devices as well.

Venkat "Selva" Selvamanickam, M.D. Anderson Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering, director of the Applied Research Hub of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston (TcSUH) and Chief Technology Advisor for SuperPower, will lead the research project.

"This grant will be used to produce a high-performance superconducting wire to build a light, high power and high efficiency wind turbine generator. Superconducting wire enables us to build wind generators with power ratings at 10 megawatt and above, which are suitable for offshore wind power plants," Selvamanickam said. "The use of high-power generators can reduce installation, maintenance and capital costs of the turbine and the wind power plants."

"While conventional generator windings are made of copper wire, with a superconducting wire, it is possible to pass hundreds of times more electric current than a copper wire," Selvamanickam said. "But the cost of superconducting wire is currently very expensive. Our goal is to develop a low cost superconducting wire that will make superconducting wind generators become more practical for widespread use."

Arthur P. Kazanjian, general manager at SuperPower, said, "SuperPower, which is now establishing a Specialty Products facility at the UH Energy Research Park, will transition the technology now being developed at UH to SuperPower's manufacturing plant in Schenectady, N.Y. This project builds on the wire technology that was developed in Schenectady since SuperPower's formation in 2000 and improved further by a two-fold better performance achieved at UH last year."

In this project, Tai Yang Research, a Florida-based corporation, will fabricate and test a wind turbine generator coil using the new superconducting wire based on design developed by TECO-Westinghouse Motor Company.

TECO-Westinghouse Motor Company, as the principal purveyor of the generator design, will focus its efforts on the design analysis and manufacturability of the resulting scalable generator design to include cryogenic cooling and quench protection demonstration. TECO-Westinghouse Motor Company will use the new superconducting wire to build offshore wind turbine generators and the next generation of power-dense motors and generators. NREL will evaluate the impact of the enhanced superconducting wire on the overall system performance.

The projects that received ARPA-E support all focus on accelerating innovations in clean technology while increasing the nation's competitiveness in rare-earth alternatives and breakthroughs in biofuels, thermal storage, grid controls and solar power electronics, the DOE said.

"These innovative projects are at the forefront of a new technological frontier that plays a critical role in our future energy security and economic growth," says Arun Majumdar, director of ARPA-E. "It is now more important than ever to invest in game-changing ideas that will build the technological infrastructure for a new, clean energy economy."

This is the second ARPA-E grant awarded to projects involving superconducting research at UH in partnership with SuperPower, the first member of the UH Applied Research Hub. Last September, UH, SuperPower and two other institutions received a $4.2 million grant to develop an affordable, large-scale superconducting magnet energy storage (SMES) system device. Energy storage is crucial in developing the widespread use of wind and solar power.

In that project, Selvamanickam and the UH-SuperPower research group are working to develop an HTS wire that meets the performance and cost requirements of a commercial SMES device through investigation of an innovative manufacturing process. By comparison, in this project the researchers are investigating new way to improve the superconducting wire itself, enabling breakthrough use in superconducting generators.

"Both of these projects demonstrate the strength of public-private partnerships to move technology forward in ways that can greatly benefit us all," said Rathindra N. Bose, UH vice chancellor/vice president of research and technology transfer. "These projects combine all the elements needed to get a new technology to the market – the technology R&D, the development of a high-tech work force, the manufacturing capability, the sub-components and, finally, the path to the marketplace."

Provided by University of Houston