Improvement in trapped fields by stacking bulk superconductors

Abstract

We studied the effects of stacking several bulk superconductor blocks on the field trapping properties. In order to avoid the detrimental effects of the bottom deteriorated parts, bulk Dy–Ba–Cu–O superconductors 45 mm in diameter and 10 mm in thickness were cut from the top parts of as-grown bulk blocks of 25 mm diameter. We stacked the superconductors and measured the field distribution as a function of the gap. The trapped field measurements were performed by field-cooling the samples inserted in between two permanent magnets with liquid nitrogen. It was found that the trapped field values are almost doubled when the number of stacked bulk superconductors increased from two to three. The present results clearly show that one can expect beneficial effects of increasing the ratio of the height to the diameter even in bulk high temperature superconductors.