Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide - Applications in Technology

Applications in Technology

"The implementation of thin-film YBCO receiver coils has improved the signal-to-noise ratio of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers by a factor of 3 compared to that achievable with conventional coils."

Several commercial applications of high temperature superconducting materials have been realized. For example, superconducting materials are finding use as magnets in magnetic resonance imaging, magnetic levitation, and Josephson junctions. (The most used material for power cables and magnets is BSCCO.)

YBCO has yet to be used in many applications involving superconductors for two primary reasons:

• First, while single crystals of YBCO have a very high critical current density, polycrystals have a very low critical current density: only a small current can be passed while maintaining superconductivity. This problem is due to crystal grain boundaries in the material. When the grain boundary angle is greater than about 5°, the supercurrent cannot cross the boundary. The grain boundary problem can be controlled to some extent by preparing thin films via CVD or by texturing the material to align the grain boundaries.
• A second problem limiting the use of this material in technological applications is associated with processing of the material. Oxide materials such as this are brittle, and forming them into wires by any conventional process does not produce a useful superconductor. (Unlike BSCCO, the powder-in-tube process does not give good results with YBCO.)

It should be noted that cooling materials to liquid nitrogen temperature (77 K) is often not practical on a large scale, although many commercial magnets are routinely cooled to liquid helium temperatures (4.2 K).

The most promising method developed to utilize this material involves deposition of YBCO on flexible metal tapes coated with buffering metal oxides. This is known as coated conductor. Texture (crystal plane alignment) can be introduced into the metal tape itself (the RABiTS process) or a textured ceramic buffer layer can be deposited, with the aid of an ion beam, on an untextured alloy substrate (the IBAD process). Subsequent oxide layers prevent diffusion of the metal from the tape into the superconductor while transferring the template for texturing the superconducting layer. Novel variants on CVD, PVD, and solution deposition techniques are used to produce long lengths of the final YBCO layer at high rates. Companies pursuing these processes include American Superconductor, Superpower (a division of Intermagnetics General Corp), Sumitomo, Fujikura, Nexans Superconductors, and European Advanced Superconductors. A much larger number of research institutes have also produced YBCO tape by these methods.