SMS President and Founder, Dr. Alexander Otto, and Co-founder and VP Linda Saraco are dedicated to fostering and building relationships that promote and enable success with strategic team members on all fronts in both business growth and technical development, primarily in the area of high temperature superconductors (HTS).

 

Our home team includes staff engineers, business advisors, local consultants, support services personnel, and institutions, as well as technical experts such as Professor Voccio of Wentworth Institute of Technology.

For our global team, we have established superb working relationships with leading organizations, facilities, and researchers.  SMS is integrated into collaborative programs that address key challenges and opportunities in HTS conductor and application development programs that are also, in a number of cases, customer driven.

These collaborations are vital to mastering the complexity of HTS science, processing, and property characterizations by the use of highly specialized equipment and techniques that, through these relationships, enable more rapid and effective SMS product development without consuming excessive resources.

Our collaborators

The Applied Superconductivity Superconducting Center (ASC) at Florida State University (FSU)

As leaders in superconductor research, Professor Larbalestier and his staff at the ASC have pioneered processes for boosting the performance of new superconductors to commercial levels, among them, the materials that SMS has developed into high strength wire and cabled product forms. Vital collaborations with the ASC have been ongoing since SMS was founded, in the areas of HTS wire, cable and coil development, as well as in a wide range of materials property testing and analysis.

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) at FSU

As the leaders in high field magnet design, technology, and operating capability, the NHMFL is providing vital insights into the properties of our materials in the areas of cryogenic strength testing and evaluations of electrical properties in large background magnetic fields.

The FBML at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

With a long history of innovation in high field magnetics, and now focused on MRI and NMR, the FBML, in particular, the laboratory of Professor Iwasa, has assisted SMS development efforts by completing the fast turnaround electrical measurements that have been vital to realizing rapid progress on product development. They have also collaborated on the development at SMS of persistent current capability for HTS.

The Plasma Science and Fusion Laboratory (PSFC) at MIT

The PSFC is a vital member of the SMS team, enabling the rapid and effective development of unique, low-loss, cabled HTS, by providing their cabling line and related technical guidance to SMS, as well as including SMS in a number of their coil design and development programs.

The Department of Energy (DOE)                             

The DOE has a large interest in the development and use of advanced superconductors, for example in High Energy Physics Accelerator equipment, as well as in wind generators, and they have provided support to SMS through a number of grants notably SBIR awards DE-SC0011334, and DE-SC0017709 for the development of strong rectangular and round HTS wires – and their cabled forms that are uniquely available from SMS for a broad range of applications.

The National Institute of Health (NIH)

The NIH is very interested in the application of HTS for advancing both MRI and NMR imaging via higher field, more economically cooled magnets. Most notably, the NIH has provided SBIR award-based support (1 R43 EB 025109 – 01) to SMS for the development of commercial HTS coils with the kind of persistent current operating mode that has been found with low temperature superconductors to be vital for achieving optimal performance.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

NASA is interested in and utilizes a broad range of superconducting systems. In the case of SMS, NASA has recently granted 2 SBIR awards, one for development of an advanced magnet for space-based detectors, and another for the development of the kind of low ac loss, high operating temperature stators that are required for a new and revolutionary type of electric airplane that is now globally under development.

 

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