Development of high temperature superconductors for magnetic field applications

摘要

The key requirement for magnetic field applications of high temperature superconductor (HTS) materials is to have conductors with high transport critical current density available for magnet builders. After 3 or 4 years of being without any such object, conductor makers have had recent success in producing simple conductor prototypes. These have permitted the construction of simple HTS magnets having self fields exceeding 1 tesla at 4K. Thus the scientific feasibility of making powerful HTS magnets has been demonstrated. Attention to the technological aspects of making HTS conductors for magnets with strong flux pinning and reduced superconducting granularity is now sensible and attractive. However, extrinsic defects such as filament sausaging, cracking, misaligned grains and other perturbation to long range current flow must be controlled at a low level if the benefit of intrinsic improvements to the critical current density is to be maintained in the conductor form. Due to the great complexity of the HTS materials, there is sometimes confusion as to whether a given sample has an intrinsically or extrinsically limited critical current density. Systematic microstructure variation experiments and resistive transition analysis are shown to be particularly helpful in this phase of conductor development.