No Arabic abstract
Bi-2212 round wire is made by the powder-in-tube technique. An unavoidable property of powder-in-tube conductors is that there is about 30% void space in the as-drawn wire. We have recently shown that the gas present in the as-drawn Bi-2212 wire agglomerates into large bubbles and that they are presently the most deleterious current limiting mechanism. By densifying short 2212 wires before reaction through cold isostatic pressing (CIPping), the void space was almost removed and the gas bubble density was reduced significantly, resulting in a doubled engineering critical current density (JE) of 810 A/mm2 at 5 T, 4.2 K. Here we report on densifying Bi-2212 wire by swaging, which increased JE (4.2 K, 5 T) from 486 A/mm2 for as-drawn wire to 808 A/mm2 for swaged wire. This result further confirms that enhancing the filament packing density is of great importance for making major JE improvement in this round-wire magnet conductor.
Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x is the only cuprate superconductor that can be made into a round-wire conductor form with a high enough critical current density Jc for applications. Here we show that the Jc(5 T,4.2 K) of such Ag-sheathed filamentary wires can be doubled to more than 1.4x10^5 A/cm^2 by low temperature oxygenation. Careful analysis shows that the improved performance is associated with a 12 K reduction in transition temperature Tc to 80 K and a significant enhancement in intergranular connectivity. In spite of the macroscopically untextured nature of the wire, overdoping is highly effective in producing high Jc values.
Recently the interest about Bi-2212 round wire superconductor for high magnetic field use has been enhancing despite the fact that an increase of the critical current is still needed to boost its successful use in such applications. Recent studies have demonstrated that the main obstacle to current flow, especially in long wires, is the residual porosity inside these Powder-In-Tube processed conductors which develops in bubbles-agglomeration when the Bi-2212 melts. Through this work we tried to overcome this issue acting on the wire densification by changing the deformation process. Here we show the effects of groove-rolling versus drawing process on the critical current density JC and on the microstructure. In particular, groove-rolled multifilamentary wires show a JC increased by a factor of about 3 with respect to drawn wires prepared with the same Bi-2212 powder and architecture. We think that this approach in the deformation process is able to produce the required improvements both because the superconducting properties are enhanced and because it makes the fabrication process faster and cheaper.
It is well known that longer Bi-2212 conductors have significantly lower critical current density (Jc) than shorter ones, and recently it has become clear that a major cause of this reduction is internal gas pressure generated during heat treatment, which expands the wire diameter and dedensifies the Bi-2212 filaments. Here we report on the length-dependent expansion of 5 to 240 cm lengths of state-of-the-art, commercial Ag alloy-sheathed Bi-2212 wire after full and some partial heat treatments. Detailed image analysis along the wire length shows that the wire diameter increases with distance from the ends, longer samples often showing evident damage and leaks provoked by the internal gas pressure. Comparison of heat treatments carried out just below the melting point and with the usual melt process makes it clear that melting is crucial to developing high internal pressure. The decay of Jc away from the ends is directly correlated to the local wire diameter increase, which decreases the local Bi-2212 filament mass density and lowers Jc, often by well over 50%. It is clear that control of the internal gas pressure is crucial to attaining the full Jc of these very promising round wires and that the very variable properties of Bi-2212 wires are due to the fact that this internal gas pressure has so far not been well controlled.
Understanding what makes Bi$_2$Sr$_2$Ca$_1$Cu$_2$O$_x$ (Bi-2212) the only high critical current density ($J_c$), high temperature superconductor (HTS) capable of being made as a round wire (RW) is important intellectually because high $J_c$ RW Bi-2212 breaks the paradigm that forces biaxially textured REBCO and uniaxially textured (Bi,Pb)$_2$Sr$_2$Ca$_2$Cu$_3$O$_x$ (Bi-2223) into tape geometries that reproduce the strong anisotropy of the native crystal structure and force expensive fabrication routes to ensure the best possible texture with minimum density of high angle grain boundaries. The biaxial growth texture of Bi-2212 developed during a partial melt heat treatment should favor high $J_c$, even though its $sim$15$^{circ}$ full width at half maximum (FWHM) grain-to-grain misorientation is well beyond the commonly accepted strong-coupling range. Its ability to be strongly overdoped should be valuable too, since underdoped cuprate grain boundaries are widely believed to be weakly linked. Accordingly, we here study property changes after oxygen underdoping the optimized, overdoped wire. While $J_c$ and vortex pinning diminish significantly in underdoped wires, we were not able to develop the prominent weak-link signature (a hysteretic $J_c$(H) characteristic) evident in even the very best Bi-2223 tapes with a $sim$ 15$^{circ}$ FWHM uniaxial texture. We attribute the high $J_c$ and lack of weak link signature in our Bi-2212 round wires to the high-aspect ratio, large-grain, basal-plane-faced grain morphology produced by partial-melt processing of Bi-2212 which enables $c$-axis Brick-Wall current flow when $ab$-plane transport is blocked. We conclude that the presently optimized biaxial texture of Bi-2212 intrinsically constitutes a strongly coupled current path, regardless of its oxygen doping state.
High-temperature superconductors (HTS) could enable high-field magnets much stronger than is possible with Nb-Ti and Nb3Sn, but two key limiting factors have so far been the difficulty of achieving high critical current density in long-length conductors, especially in high-current cables, and the danger of quenches out of the superconducting into the normal state. Here we demonstrate stable, reliable and training-quench-free performance of Bi-2212 racetrack coils wound with a 17-strand Rutherford cable fabricated from wires made with nanospray Bi-2212 powder. These multifilament wires are now being delivered in single lengths of more than 1 km with a new record whole-wire critical current density up to 950 A/mm2 at 30 T at 4.2 K. These coils carried up to 8.6 kA while generating a peak field of 3.5 T at 4.2 K, at a wire current density of 1020 A/mm2. Quite different from the unpredictable training performance of Nb-Ti and Nb3Sn magnets, these Bi-2212 magnets showed no training quenches and entered the flux flow state in a stable manner before thermal runaway and quench occurred. Also quite different from Nb-Ti, Nb3Sn, and REBCO magnets for which localized thermal runaways occur at unpredictable locations, the quenches of Bi-2212 magnets consistently occurred in the high field regions over a conductor length greater than one meter. These characteristics make quench detection rather simple, enabling safe protection, and suggest a new paradigm of constructing quench-predictable superconducting magnets from Bi-2212, which is, like Nb-Ti and Nb3Sn, isotropic, round, multifilament, uniform over km lengths and suitable for Rutherford cable use but, unlike them, much more tolerant of the energy disturbances that often lead Nb-based superconducting magnets to premature quench and long training cycles.