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news release:
American Superconductor
and Siemens Renew Strategic Alliance to Develop Fault Current Limiter
Westborough, MA and Erlangen, Germany, Feb. 1:
American Superconductor Corporation (NASDAQ:
AMSC), a leading electricity solutions company, and the Corporate Technology
unit of Siemens AG (NYSE:
SI), a global power systems company, today announced the two firms have
renewed their strategic alliance for a second year to develop and explore the
commercialization aspects of high temperature superconductor (HTS) fault current
limiters by building and testing fault current limiter components based on
AMSC's second generation (2G) HTS wire.
Fault current limiters are expected to serve as
high-voltage surge protectors for power grids. The companies said they had
exceeded technical performance expectations during the first year of their
alliance and that they have targeted the demonstration of a small-scale 2G HTS
fault current limiter device by the end of the second year of the alliance.
During the first year of the strategic alliance,
Siemens and AMSC successfully demonstrated fast and uniform switching of AMSC's
2G HTS wire to a resistive state in response to surges of current -- a response
that was much better than expected at this early stage -- confirming the
functionality of the wire for use in the production of economically viable fault
current limiters, which are expected to become available commercially over the
next couple of years.
Superconductors are smart materials because they
possess unique physical properties that allow them to react instantaneously to
current surges, passing electricity along with no resistance while also being
able to recognize and then suppress large surges of electrical current by
switching rapidly to the resistive state. Suppressing spikes of electrical
current is important because it prevents damage to expensive electrical
equipment in power grids.
The joint results obtained with these smart 2G
HTS wires are being presented at the Department of Energy's Wire Development
Workshop in St. Petersburg, Florida, January 31 and February 1, 2006, by AMSC's
Chief Technical Officer, Alexis Malozemoff.
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