Superconducting wire

Superconducting wire's advantages over copper or aluminum include higher maximum current densities and zero power dissipation.

Vanadium–gallium (V3Ga) can be prepared by surface diffusion where the high temperature component as a solid is bathed in the other element as liquid or gas.

[15] These wires are in a form of a metal tape of about 10 mm width and about 100 micrometer thickness, coated with superconductor materials such as YBCO.

A few years after the discovery of High-temperature superconductivity materials such as the YBCO, it was demonstrated that epitaxial YBCO thin films grown on lattice matched single crystals such as magnesium oxide MgO, strontium titanate (SrTiO3) and sapphire had high supercritical current densities of 10–40 kA/mm2.

YBCO films deposited directly on metal substrate materials exhibit poor superconducting properties.

[18][19] The breakthrough came with the invention of ion beam-assisted deposition (IBAD) technique to produce of biaxially aligned yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) thin films on metal tapes and the Rolling-Assisted-Biaxially-Textured-Substrates (RABiTS) process to produce biaxially textured metallic substrates via thermomechanically processing.

[26] As of 2015[update], YBCO coated superconductor tapes capable of carrying more than 500 A/cm-width at 77 K and 1000 A/cm-width at 30 K under high magnetic field have been demonstrated.

[27][28][29][30] In 2021 YBCO coated superconductor tapes capable of carrying more than 250 A/cm-width at 77 K and 2500 A/cm-width at 20 K were reported for commercially produced wires.

Prusseit provides an overview of the thermal evaporation process used to deposit high-quality YBCO films.