Fabrication of long lengths of YBCO coated conductors using a continuous reel-to-reel dip-coating unit

A low-cost, non-vacuum, solution precursor route has been developed to produce epitaxial Gd2O3 and Eu2O3 buffer layers and YBa2Cu3O7-delta (YBCO) superconductors on biaxially textured metal substrates. On sol-gel Eu2O3 seed layers with sputtered YSZ nod CeO2 top layers, YBCO film with a J(c) Of over 1 MA/cm(2) at 77 K was obtained, On all solution buffer layers (CeO2/Eu2O3/Ni), YBCO film with a J(c) of 200,000 A/cm(2) at 77 K was grown using pulsed laser deposition (PLD), Meter lengths of epitaxial and crack-free Gd2O3 buffer layers were fabricated on cube textured Ni-W (3 at. %) substrates for the first time. High quality YBCO films were deposited on Rolling-Assisted Biaxially Textured Substrates (RABiTS) using a trifluoroacetate (TFA) precursor approach. The precursors were either spin-coated or dip-coated and decomposed in a newly developed fast 3-hour burn-out step followed by post-annealing. In a stationary burn-out route, we have produced 40 cm long crack-free YBCO TFA precursors on RABiTS, On short segments, YBCO films with a J(c),of over 500,000 A/cm(2) at 77 K were grown on all PLD buffered-Ni substrates (CeO2/YSZ/CeO2/Ni).