In 2020, this award in the category of Scientific and Technical Team of the Year was won by a team composed of employees of the Institute of Materials and Machine Mechanics SAS, Ing. Martin Balog, PhD. and Ing. Peter Krížik, PhD., and from the employees of the Institute of Electrical Engineering SAS, Ing. Pavol Kováč, DrSc., Ing. Imrich Hušek, Ľubomír Kopera and Ing. Alica Rosová, CSc.
This team of workers with many years of competence in the field of special light metals and composites and superconducting materials and conductors was formed during the development of ultralight superconducting wire.
The result of their work is the lightest superconducting wire known so far. The wire has a core of magnesium boride (MgB2) and a sheath based on a special composite material based on aluminum. The new aluminum material of the sheath belongs to the group of HITEMAL® materials originally developed as a structural, functional material prepared by powder metallurgy at the Institute of Materials and Mechanics SAS.
The research and development was motivated by the industry's demand for the preparation of lightweight superconducting wire for applications in the energy sector (e.g. wind turbines), in transport (e.g. MAGLEV trains) or in the space program (e.g. active cosmic radiation shielding of long-term flight modules). Current technical designs of MgB2-based superconductors use a sheath material form high-density metal, typically copper-based. At the same time, the current superconductor sheath represents a substantial part of the wire volume, which complicates use current superconductor wires in cases where weight is a limiting factor.
The team's invention is the subject of several patent applications.