Strongly Enhanced Current Densities in Superconducting Coated Conductors of YBa2Cu3O7-x + BaZrO3

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable method to significantly improve the in-field current densities of YBCO superconducting tapes by enhancing flux pinning, which is crucial for practical applications and commercialization.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, scalable technique that achieves a 1.5 to 5-fold increase in current densities in superconducting conductors, advancing their practical use.

Findings

1.5 to 5-fold increase in in-field current densities.

Enhanced flux pinning mechanisms demonstrated.

Potential for improved commercial superconducting tapes.

Abstract

There are numerous potential applications for superconducting tapes, based on YBa2Cu3O7-x (YBCO) films coated onto metallic substrates. A long established goal of more than 15 years has been to understand the magnetic flux pinning mechanisms which allow films to maintain high current densities out to high magnetic fields. In fact, films carry 1-2 orders of magnitude higher current densities than any other form of the material. For this reason, the idea of further improving pinning has received little attention. Now that commercialisation of conductors is much closer, for both better performance and lower fabrication costs, an important goal is to achieve enhanced pinning in a practical way. In this work, we demonstrate a simple and industrially scaleable route which yields a 1.5 to 5-fold improvement in the in-field current densities of already-high-quality conductors.