Can Superconductivity's Davids Out-Innovate The U.S. Goliaths?

The Japanese think so and have-tried to sign up super startups who can’t attract U.S. corporations to their superwares SACRAMENTO, CALIF--"It’s too low-tech for some people," admits Ray Anderson cheerfully. "But I like the idea: using low tech to make high tech." Anderson casts a slightly apologetic glance around his company’s big workshop. A crazy quilt of clutter fills it: stacked chairs, boxes, empty Pepsi cans, silvery asbestos-lined gloves, metal shelves, wooden benches and, of course, a bright-blue hydraulic press. Using that big hydraulic press, his small corporation, Ceracon Inc., is making superconducting history. Ceracon is molding the new high-temperature super conducting materials into denser tougher, potentially machinable, shapes. From there, says Anderson, it’s just a short step to products, a new superefficient magnet for, say, medical imaging devices. One might assume that U.S. manufacturers would be flipping over the idea, after all, Anderson’s was one of the first practical methods of making the new ceramics usable. Not so. A few months ago Anderson wrote 40 U.S. companies and four Japanese businesses, testing corporate interest in licensing and marketing the Ceracon process. He got quite a shock: Just one U.S. company wrote back. Three of the four Japanese corporations replied, though. "We may end up signing with the Japanese," Anderson says. "And that really does bother me, in a way. The American companies seem to think because we’re small, we don’t know anything. And I’m afraid the U.S. is just going to give the superconductivity race away to the Japanese." It’s a concern echoed here. A soon-to-be-released study by the Office of Technology Assessment suggests that the Ceracon story is a common one. OTA investigators found that every superconductor startup they talked to had been approached by the Japanese, and most had been ignored by the big U.S. corporations. "The big boys think they know it all," Anderson complains. "They think if they don’t invent it, it won’t exist for 15 years. We’re talking about sales and markets now. We think we’ll have products available in 18 months." And his optimism is shared by scientists in a host of other super-conductor startup companies. In Boston, American Superconductor Corp. is trying to develop superconducting wire. Conductis in Palo Alto, Calif., is developing thin-film products for computers. And Lawrence Murr’s Monolithic Superconductors in Beaverton, Oreg., has developed an explosive process to encapsulate fine strands of superconducting material into alloy structures. The process is so rapid that it protects the superconductors from oxidation, a major problem because it causes superconducting loss. Like Ceracon, the Oregon team tried to interest U.S. corporate giants, but without success. "You’ve got to be kidding!" Murr says, ruefully. "They’re not interested in anything risky or new....It’s the small American company that’s going to keep us ahead in superconductivity. We’re the ones who are going to keep fighting in the marketplace." As for Japanese corporations, Mun adds, some have not merely sought out his small group, they’ve mailed him ready-to-sign contracts. The U.S. electronics giants, such as IBM, AT&T, General Electric, and Westinghouse, respond to these charges by pointing to the progress being made with the high-temperature superconductors in their own labs. AT&T scientists were among the first to analyze the structure of the new ceramics. General Electric recently announced that it had been able to integrate the new materials with silicon, the building block of computer chips. Westinghouse has devised a new, fine-powder form of the ceramics that it thinks may be easier to work with. "I think people are getting carried away with the idea of the Japanese always being in the lead," says John Hulm, chief scientist for Westinghouse. "We’ve got about 20 or 30 companies involved; they don’t have much more than that. American industry is spending about $80 million this year. I think they’re spending a comparable amount. It’s all research right,now. It’s too far in the future to speculate about sales and markets at this point." "This is the time for fundamental research," agrees Paul Grant, a member of IBM’s superconductivity research team in San Jose. "The real revenue-producing applications are years away. That’s where we’re putting our efforts. Oh, there will be some niche markets along the way. Some individuals will become millionaires. But companies like IBM don’t get into business on that scale." Companies like Ceracon do. The Sacramento startup is a classic example of a small company with a stake in superconductivity, willing to push, hard if necessary, for its share of the competition. It came into the field almost by accident. Not that Ceracon wasn’t interested in working with unusual materials. The Sacramento company had developed a process for gently forcing materials such as titanium and aluminum together to make exotic alloys, using indirect pressure from its hydraulic press. The tough, light alloys have important aerospace applications. Anderson likens the process to making a mudpie, squeezing loose damp dirt into the right shape. The company more formally describes its special squeezing process as the use of a "pressure transmitter medium." The PTM, as company workers like to call it, is actually nothing more than a carbonaceous powder, resembling a fine, silky gray sand. The Ceracon workers first shape a lump of the material into the rough outlines of its final form, a primitive gear, for instance. The form is then heated to a point of flexibility. A robot arm slides it into a container filled with loose grains of the PTM, also heated. The hydraulic press then is activated, squeezing the container, shifting the PTM. No direct pressure ever touches the rough form. But the shifting powder around it—stressed according to computer calculations—puffs it into shape. Using that technique, Anderson says, the company can make a part about every five seconds. The technicians then clear the die, recycle the PTM grains, and repeat the process. The company had that system down pat well before the new superconductors. It was working with titanium aluminide alloys to improve traditional magnets for military uses and some tightly bonded aluminum products for use in machine parts. Then coincidence came along in the shape of Robert Shelton, a University of California, Davis, physicist. Shelton, the new chairman of the Davis physics department, describes his alliance with Ceracon as purely serendipitous. He arrived from Iowa in July 1987. One of his first priorities was to get the right equipment into the department’s new materials research laboratory. Because of his interest in a new type of microscope, a representative from camera-maker Nikon suggested that he check out a similar model used at a Sacramento company named Ceracon. "They were doing high-pressure work with some interesting materials," Shelton said. And I said, "How about trying out some of these new superconducting ceramics? They weren’t too interested. But then the chairman [Anderson] went to Japan and came back really excited [about the potential for commercializing superconductivity]. And about December of last year, we decided to run a few tests." The results from two rounds of testing looked too good to be true. The copper oxide ceramics went in superconducting and came out denser, curved in shape, and still superconducting. Anderson cites three requirements of a superconducting form. It must be very dense. It must preserve the original configuration of yttrium, barium, and copper oxide that made it a high-temperature superconductor to begin with. And its fine crystalline structure must be correctly aligned to allow it to carry high-voltage electrical current. So far, the Ceracon group has made a series of parts two inches high, one inch thick, and 100% dense, the company reports. The parts also display the necessary 1-2-3 configuration. But Ceracon has not been able to perfect the third requirement; that is, the neatly made forms still carry only a very low electrical current. Where millions of amps per square centimeter of material are needed, Ceracon initially did no better than 500 amps. Anderson says there are signs of improvement, but nothing to make official yet. Making materials that conduct high currents is a problem plaguing high temperature superconductivity researchers around the world. "We’ve produced some very fine wires with current between 1,000 and 5,000 amps per square centimeter," says Westinghouse’s Hulm. "That’s an improvement, but it’s not good enough. It’s the kind of problem that makes us stress that the ballgame is still in its very early stages. Too early to be talking about markets." Nonetheless, it’s a problem that doesn’t seem to be deterring the Japanese, who, the OTA group found, are far more ready to bet on as-yet-unproven products—such as those being developed by Ceracon, than their U.S. counter- parts. "The Japanese take a longer- term view of profit," says Greg Eyring of the OTA. "They [also] have a better mechanism for coupling large and small companies. That’s something that we’re going to have to learn here—and the sooner the better." Despite their compatriots’ lack of interest, most of the small firms have decided to keep the technology at home at least for now. "I’ve got Japanese contracts I could sign today," says Lawrence Murr, an Oregon physicist and partner in the newly formed Monolithic Superconductors Inc. "And if I didn’t want to keep the advances here, I’d sign one of those contracts." Deborah Blum is science writer at the Sacramento Bee.

Can Superconductivity's Davids Out-Innovate The U.S. Goliaths?

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