Development of in-plane aligned YBCO tapes fabricated by inclined substrate deposition

High temperature superconducting thin film tapes, which consist of a flexible metal substrate, buffer layer, and Y1Ba2Cu3Ox, (YBCO) layer have been developed for power application. Ni-alloy tape was used as the substrate. Both the YBCO layer and the buffer layer were formed by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) because of an advantageous of high deposition rate. Inclined substrate deposition (ISD) was developed to introduce in-plane alignment for the buffer layer on the non-textured metal substrate. YBCO films epitaxially deposited on the ISD buffer layer by normal PLD had high J(c) values over 10(5) A/cm(2) at 77 K. For verification of high rate productivity of the PLD/ISD method, we demonstrated high rate deposition of the yttria stabilized zirconia buffer layer and YBCO superconducting layer. We also performed continuous deposition of over 10 m YBCO thin film tapes with a reel-to-reel substrate transfer system combined with 200 W high power laser equipment. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.