With the CERN particle-physics lab turning 70 this year, I’ve been thinking about the impact of big science on business. There are hundreds – if not thousands – of examples I could cite, the most famous being, of course, the World Wide Web. It was devised at CERN in 1989 by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who was seeking a way to organise and share the huge amounts of data produced by the lab’s fundamental science experiments.
Whilst the Web wasn’t a spin-off technology as such, it’s hard to think of anything developed with one purpose in mind that’s had such far-reaching applications across the whole of business and society. Indeed, CERN can lay claim to lots of spin-off firms that have pushed the boundaries of technology. Many of those firms specialize in detectors, imaging and sensors, but quite a few are involved in materials, coatings, healthcare and environmental applications.
It would be impossible for me to discuss them all in a short article, but there are lots – and CERN is rather good these days at knowledge transfer. So too are large national labs, such as Harwell and Daresbury in the UK, which have co-ordinated spin-out and knowledge transfer activities supported by UK Research and Innovation. A recent report from the UK government claims that firms spun out from the country’s public sector had raised a total of £5.1bn of investment and created more than 7000 new jobs over the last four decades.
One particularly exciting spin-off from big science is from the burgeoning fusion industry. There are currently about 40 different companies around the world trying to develop commercial fusion-power plants that can serve as a sustainable source of electricity in our quest for net zero. Whilst the sector is making steady progress towards that goal, the associated technology could have some other rather interesting applications too.
Fusion tech
Consider Tokamak Energy, which was founded in 2009 by a group of scientists and researchers at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, making it a spin-out of sorts. The company’s main aim is to build a tokamak fusion plant that could one day deliver electricity to the grid. But over the years it’s also become rather good at making high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets, with more than 200 patents to its name.
The company is, for example, working with the US Department of Energy, via the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to build a magnetohydrodynamic drive (MHD). Such a device, which provides propulsion without any moving parts, conjures up visions of the great 1990s movie The Hunt for Red October, where Sean Connery played a Soviet sailor captaining a submarine that can’t be detected by sonar.
One particularly exciting spin-off from big science is from the burgeoning fusion industry
In terms of physics, an MHD drive uses electric fields to accelerate an electrically conducting fluid. A magnetic field applied perpendicularly to the flow creates a thrust – the Lorenz force – at 90 degrees to the electric and magnetic fields, in accordance with the right-hand rule. Back in the 1990s, the Japanese firm Mitsubishi did build a ship – Yamato 1 – powered by a prototype MHD thruster, but with the technology available at the time limiting magnetic fields to just 4T, the boat only had a top speed of 15 km/h.
Since then, however, HTS magnet technology has markedly improved. In 2019, for example, Tokamak Energy announced it had built a magnet that produced a record-breaking 24T field at 20K. Based on superconducting barium-copper-oxide tape technology, the magnet is designed to be used in the poloidal field coils of a tokamak fusion device. The superconducting magnets at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion facility in the UK, in contrast, produced fields of only 4T.
For Tokamak Energy to create such a powerful magnet was quite an achievement, and you can imagine that it could improve MHD performance and open the door to many other applications too. In fact, the company has just launched a new business division called TE Magnetics, focusing on HTS magnet technology. It wants to tap into a market that a recent report from Future Market Insights reckons was worth an astonishing $3.3bn in 2023.
Aircraft advances
David Kingham, co-founder and executive vice-chair of Tokomak Energy, points to applications of HTS magnets in everything from space thrusters and proton-beam therapy to motors and generators for wind turbines and planes. That final application is perhaps the most intriguing as it’s very difficult for non-superconducting motors to achieve the huge power density needed for large aircraft to fly.
If you’re thinking an HTS-powered plane sounds far-fetched, it turns out that Airbus is already on the case, as are many other firms too. Over the last few years, Airbus has been developing prototype motors using this kind of technology that, to me, are a serious contender in the quest for low-carbon air travel. Through its ASCEND programme, the company has already built a 500 kW powertrain featuring an electric motor powered by the current from HTS tape.
Airbus thinks the cryogenics needed to cool the tape could be driven by the liquid hydrogen fuel that would generate the power in a fuel cell. The beauty of superconducting systems is that they’re much more efficient than conventional technology and can deliver huge power densities – pointing the way to lighter and more efficient planes.
If you think a plane powered by high-temperature superconductors sounds far-fetched, it turns out that Airbus is already on the case
There’s obviously a little more work to do before such technology can reach commercial reality. After all, getting today’s city-hopping turboprop planes off the ground using electric power alone would require around 8 MW of power. But what Airbus has done is a promising start – and reliable HTS magnets will be vital for this work to really succeed.
Another company working on the electrification of air transport is Evolito, which was spun out in 2021 by the UK firm YASA. Now owned by Mercedes-Benz, YASA is a pioneer of “axial-flux” electric motors, which have very high power densities yet don’t need to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures. YASA has already worked with Rolls-Royce to develop Spirit of Innovation, which in 2021 claimed the record for the world’s fastest electric plane, clocking a top speed of 623 km/h.
My message is simple: spin-offs and spin-outs are everywhere. So next time you have your head down and are working on something very specific, keep an open mind as to what else it could be used for – it may be more commercially relevant than you think. The applications could be even more than you ever imagined – and if you don’t believe me, just go and ask Tim Berners-Lee.
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