Progress towards a low-cost coated conductor technology

Progress in the development of an economically and technically viable YBCO coated conductor technology for HTS wire using deformation-textured buffered substrates and solution-deposited superconductor layers is reported. Biaxially textured Ni substrates have been fabricated using a deformation texturing process. Epitaxial oxide buffer layers have been deposited by a combination of a-beam deposition and magnetron sputtering. Epitaxial YBCO films have been grown using a trifluoroacetate solution precursor. The resulting composite conductors have critical current densities approaching 2 MA/cm(2) at 77K in self-field. Critical current densities of 4.5 MA/cm(2) have been also obtained on CeO2 buffered YSZ single crystal substrates, demonstrating performance parity with vacuum deposited YBCO films.