Investigation of the crystallization process of CSD-ErBCO on IBAD-substrate via DSD approach

Abstract

REBa2Cu3O7-δ (REBCO, RE: rare earth, such as Y and Gd) compounds have been extensively studied as a superconducting layer in coated conductors. Although ErBCO potentially has better superconducting properties than YBCO and GdBCO, little research has been made on it, especially in chemical solution deposition (CSD). In this work, ErBCO films were deposited on IBAD (ion-beam-assisted-deposition) substrates by CSD with low-fluorine solutions. The crystallization process was optimized to achieve the highest self-field critical current density (Jc) at 77 K. Commonly, for the investigation of a CSD process involving numerous process factors, one factor is changed keeping the others constant, requiring much time and cost. For more efficient investigation, this study adopted a novel design-of-experiment technique, definitive screening design (DSD), for the first time in CSD process. Two different types of solutions containing Er-propionate or Er-acetate were used to make two types of samples, Er-P and Er-A, respectively. Within the investigated range, we found that crystallization temperature, dew point, and oxygen partial pressure play a key role in Er-P, while the former two factors are significant for Er-A. DSD revealed these significant factors among six process factors with only 14 trials. Moreover, the DSD approach allowed us to create models that predict Jc accurately. These models revealed the optimum conditions giving the highest Jc values of 3.6 MA/cm2 for Er-P and 3.0 MA/cm2 for Er-A. These results indicate that DSD is an attractive approach to optimize CSD process.

Progress in superconducting REBa2Cu3O7 (RE = rare earth) coated conductors derived from fluorinated solutions

“…Understanding the main trends of REBCO nucleation and growth has strongly facilitated to prepare CCs using different metallic substrates (RABiT, IBAD) leading to fairly good superconducting performances, including the reel-to-reel continuous process used at industrial scale [30,58,140,142,[169][170][171][172]. It is also worth to remark that owing to the global complexity of the CSD BaF 2 growth process, several attempts of using experimental fast screening and big data approaches have been made to accelerate the optimization of CCs and to correlate processing, nanostructure and superconducting properties [143,147,173].…”

Unravelling the Crystallization Process in Solution-Derived YBa2Cu3O7-δ Nanocomposite Films with Preformed ZrO2 Nanocrystals via Definitive Screening Design

“…In preliminary experiments under similar conditions, the responses for pristine and 5 mol % ZrO 2 added nanocomposite YBCO films show similar outcomes for fwhm, J c , and T c with insignificant variances. Therefore, the extra center runs to estimate the population variance of responses as described by Hayasaka et al were not included in the training set. For the analysis of the responses, the statistical software package JMP was used.…”

“…However, this approach is not possible for CSD YBCO nanocomposites due to the complexity of CSD . Definitive screening design (DSD), which is applied to CSD-based YBCO nanocomposites for the first time, is a powerful screening method to estimate the model coefficients of the main effects, two-factor interactions, and quadratic effects for k factors with only a minimal number of experiments. − It has been used previously to study the growth of pristine REBCO films by Hayasaka et al for the case of ErBCO films.…”

Defining inkjet printing conditions of superconducting cuprate films through machine learning

“…DSD has been successfully applied to optimize the synthesis of mesoporous carbon, titania nanoparticles, as well as fine tune the fabrication of TFA-REBCO superconductors. [23][24][25][26] On the other side of the spectrum we have the highthroughput approaches that explore a large number of parameters. High-throughput experimentation (HTE) is a methodology that is currently driving attention in fields such as catalysis, 27,28 solar cells, 29,30 batteries, 31 electronics 32 and superconductivity 33,34 thanks to its capability for parallel sample fabrication and characterization.…”

“…DSD has been successfully applied to optimize the synthesis of mesoporous carbon, titania nanoparticles, as well as fine tune the fabrication of TFA-REBCO superconductors. 23–26…”