An invention thats needed and would be worth billions

[Morley]

KennyR wrote:
Sitting here in my hot room, I've identified a hole in the market where a new innovation is badly needed - the humble transformer. No, not robots in disguise, those things that are in practically everything electrical you own - including the monitor you're looking at now.

See, these little transformer things are pretty simple - two copper coils placed slightly apart from each other. Current flows through one side, generates a magnetic field, which causes a current to flow in the other. The number of loops of copper on each side determine how much the voltage goes up or goes down on the other end. Thats what transformers do - transform one voltage to another.

Simple - but with one flaw: they're very inefficient. Because of all that copper, their electrical resistance is high, and they generate a lot of heat. They also lose power from magnetism, and from noise (hummmmmmm). Touch the back of your monitor, or the little boxes that come on the end of some flexes at the plug. They're warm. That's another kind of transformer.

And higher wattage ones (such in all computer PSUs) need active cooling. That means fans. More power wasted. And if you have too many, you'll need air conditioning. Industries must lose trillions of dollars from energy wasted on transformers alone, and the householder too. Replacing them would mean all this money saved, plus it would be friendlier for the planet. As the oil supplies run out, this technology will become even more essential.

So here's the challenge - invent something more efficient that can do the same job. The LED and the fluorescent did it for the filament bulb, the transistor did it for the diode, internal combustion did it for the steam engine. The person or company to invent an efficient replacement for the transformer will end up mega-rich, and will have contributed enormously to science and industry.

Uhmm....we already have SMPS (switch mode power supplies) which are very efficient at transforming voltage down, but can't be used to raise the voltage.

I'm unsure what they use in those DC->AC 12V->240V transformers(inverters) to raise the voltage.

But once we can utilize superconductors coiled transformers will be nearly 100% effective. Or close enough.

[Morley]

KennyR wrote:

As far as I remember SMPS use capacitors and aren't useful for most applications. And aren't that much more efficient either because of capacitive loss.

SMPS are used for most high-current applications. The PSU in your computer? SMPS; and more and more applications are utlizing SMPS to help reduce weight and increase effiency. Capacitor loss here is close to zero when compared to regular "coil" transformers. The downside of SMPS is acoustic and electrical noise. Therefore they are hard to use in audio and visual equipment like TV's and Hifi's. Large PA amplifiers use SMPS though.

There's probably no such thing as the room-temperature superconductor because of quantum decoherence. Superconductors need cooling which needs more power...

Anyway, its the same principle. Use a magnetic field to jump power from one cable to the next. There has to be a better way.

I wasn't thinking of the tiny transformer in your home, but superconductors can be used in large transformerstations, where the loss is very huge. Keeping a superconductor cool will in fact not use excessive power, as a transformer with superconductors will creative very little heat in theory...

I will try to figure out what they use in powerinverters, I think they are pretty effective, but use expensive parts.