Roll-to-Roll Manufacturing of Thin Film Superconductor Tapes: Status, Challenges, and Opportunities

Vankat Selvamanickam, University of Houston

High Temperature Superconductors (HTS) are beginning to impact a large potential market in diverse applications such as energy, health, military, telecommunication, transportation and research. The challenge has been in developing these brittle ceramic materials in lengths over a kilometer on flexible substrates with properties similar to that of high quality epitaxial thin films.

Tremendous progress has been made in the past two decades in the development and roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing of thin film RE-Ba-Cu-O (REBCO, RE=rare-earth) superconductor tapes. Based on a unique biaxially-textured substrate/buffer architecture and epitaxial film growth, REBCO tapes have been demonstrated with high critical current densities over a wide range of temperatures. Using chemical and physical vapor deposition techniques, thin film REBCO tapes are being produced in lengths of several hundred meters with current carrying capacity of about 400 times that of copper wire of the same cross section. The major challenges in large-scale commercialization of thin film superconductor tapes are in their high cost and limited manufacturing throughput. Status, challenges and opportunities in R2R manufacturing of thin film superconductor tapes will be discussed in this presentation.