With today's unprecedented demands for power—as demonstrated by this summer's Southern heat wave—superconducting technology promises to turn on an electricity faucet and expand the current capacity of the nation's power grid. Key to that transition, is development of new and improved insulating materials, or dielectrics, to keep the flow of power in check. ORNL researchers are developing new "designer" materials and manufacturing processes that will offer improvements over today's dielectrics, used to prevent power surges and offer protection at high voltage generation and transmission sites. In a recent paper published by the Institute of Physics, Enis Tuncer of the Applied Superconductivity Group in ORNL's Fusion Energy Division describes a new technique he developed for manufacture of a nanocomposite material that holds promise in cryogenic high voltage applications. The project is supported through Laboratory Directed Research and Development funding.
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