SUPERCONDUCTING TAPES

摘要

A composite superconducting tape comprises a multiplicity of constituent superconducting tapes (12) stacked parallel to one another with major faces in contact, and at least some of constituent tapes (12) have widths not greater than half the width of the composite superconductor and are laid edge to edge with each other. Preferably all constituent superconducting tapes (12) have a width that is substantially half, or another simple fraction, of the width of the composite tape so that they form two or more substacks (15) with aligned zones (16) between them which contain no superconducting material. This will normally require the addition of a full-width tape (13) of silver or silver alloy to bridge from tape to tape, to provide sufficiently strong mechanical connection between substacks (15). Preliminary experiments suggest that this structure has substantially improved critical current compared with a stack of the same overall dimensions and composition with all full-width superconducting tapes; perhaps because of magnetic de-coupling between the substacks.