Preparation of high-quality HTS rings for application in the magnetic bearing of cryotanks and pinning in grain boundaries

摘要

Seeded melt growth of YBCO high-temperature superconductors is one of the most promising preparation techniques to obtain high-quality HTS tiles for application, e.g. in magnetic bearings. Semi-finished HTSL products of complex shapes have to be developed by different seeding and multi-seeding techniques. To obtain large hollow cylinders designed for application in the magnetic bearing of a cryotank a modified multi-seeded melt growth (MSMG) process was employed. This cryotank will be mounted for testing in a vehicle of a major German car manufacturer. The MSMG process introduces grain boundaries into the HTS tiles. For transport current investigations of [0 01]-tilt grain boundaries in melt textured YBCO a series of MSMG bicrystals have been prepared. They exhibit a dependence of the critical current density on misorientation angle which is much weaker than the one observed in thin-film bicrystals. The bulk samples have dimensions larger than the magnetic penetration depth along the grain boundary. Thus, flux pinning has to be taken into account. Different contributions to the longitudinal pinning force have to be considered: vortices at grain boundaries can be pinned by magnetic interaction with Abrikosov vortices in the banks, by defects in the grain boundary itself or by defects which are located next to the grain boundary.