With a strong passion in physics and engineering, Jiamin Zhu has always aspired to work on a frontier technology and make an impact on this world. Upon graduating university, he was driven by this motivation and joined a team to found Shanghai Superconductor Technology (SST) Co., Ltd. Starting from scratch, he led the team to battle against all difficulties and managed to innovate, design, and assemble the entire 2G HTS production line.
During this course, Zhu came up with asymmetrical heating during pulsed laser deposition and developed non-contact instantaneous cooling technique for HTS lamination. These innovations overcame key obstacles and enabled industrial mass production of 2G HTS at SST.
He has also developed a complete quality control procedure and the associated measurement platforms for the key specifications of HTS products. To address the challenge of limited piece length of HTS product, he developed a novel joint structure and pushed it into industrialization. It was the least-resistive 2G HTS joint available in the global market. He solved many application difficulties in the industry, such as over-current quench, impregnation degradation and stainless-steel lamination failure.
Most importantly, Zhu developed low cost HTS material targeting power transmission application and high engineering current density HTS material targeting fusion application, pushing forward the progress of HTS adoption in the low-carbon energy sector. Nowadays, SST has become the 2G HTS supply leader in China and is also ranked as a top tier 2G HTS material provider in the world. In China, the company has supplied materials for three high-voltage Superconducting Fault Current Limiters, the first megawatt-level induction heating device, a world-record full superconducting steady-state magnet and the first kilometer-level HTS cable.
In particular, Zhu successfully led SST to develop HTS product of high engineering current density, a critical raw material for CFS’ 20 Tesla compact fusion magnet. This technology was also included in the “10 Breakthrough Technologies” by MIT Technology Review 2022.
Out of the 16 2G HTS suppliers in the world, only 2 managed to produce high J(e) products using 30μm substrates, and only SST managed to produce even higher J(e) products using 25μm substrates, bringing us closer to the ultimate energy aim of mankind.
