Research, Development and Commercialization of Coated Conductors by SuperOx

Since the discovery of high temperature superconductivity 35 years ago the superconducting tapes of second generation (2G HTS) or so-called coated conductors (CC) have proved to be the only material which was actually developed and scaled up to a practical level and can be utilized for various applications. During 30 years of CC development several alternative approaches were proposed, introduced and examined by different companies worldwide. At present the most advanced CC are manufacturing by combination of ion beam assisted deposition with pulsed laser deposition techniques (IBAD/PLD).<br/>In a past 10 years our group, which consists of SuperOx and S-Innovations (both located in Russia) and SuperOx Japan, became the world leader in IBAD/PLD production, customization and application of 2G HTS and recently reached a level of 1000 km per year – the maximal production capacity reported for companies working in this field.<br/>In this presentation we introduce the new SuperOx manufacturing facilities mainly focusing on fabrication of coated conductors for 3 different applications: Superconducting fault current limiters (SFCL), superconducting motors for aircrafts and superconducting coils for fusion reactors.<br/>The SuperOx research and development of new 2G HTS products based on combination of various physical, chemical and technical approaches including: chemical substitutions, oxygen nonstoichiometry, artificial pinning centers, ion irradiation and fabrication of multilayers etc. Our record state of the art tapes demonstrating extremely attractive properties, for instance critical current Ic &gt;1000A/12mm (s.f, 77K), engineering current Je &gt;1500A/mm² at 20K-20T.<br/>We carried out statistical analysis of large number of industrially produced tapes and systematic examination of various sample batches by XRD, SEM-EDX, TEM, micro-Raman techniques to identify the processing parameters and microstructural features responsible for superior Ic-B characteristics. Special attention was paid to improve the reproducibility, increase the production yield and finally to reduce the product cost - a key factor which determine the future of coated conductors and potential size of the whole superconductivity market.