Improvements of liquid source for infiltration and growth of GdBa 2Cu 3O 7− x superconducting single grains

Abstract

The infiltration and growth (IG) process is an effective method for the preparation of single-grain REBa 2Cu 3O 7− x (RE-123) bulk superconductors with finely dispersed RE 2BaCuO 5 (RE-211) particles, compared with the conventional melt growth (MG) technique. However, this process is more complicated and time-consuming because three kinds of precursor powders, involving RE-211, RE-123 and BaCuO 2, have to be prepared for the IG process. Based on the regular liquid source composed of RE-123 and Ba 3Cu 5O 8, in this paper, different new liquid sources were developed for simplifying the IG process. And the GdBa 2Cu 3O 7− x (Gd-123) single grains have been successfully prepared using these liquid sources. The morphology, microstructure and levitation force of the Gd-123 superconducting grains have also been investigated. The results indicate that the new liquid sources can be used to simplify the process flow, reduce the cost and advance the efficiency during the fabrication of single-grain Gd-123 superconductors, because only two precursor powders (GdBaCuO 5 and BaCuO 2) are needed to prepare for the whole process flow.