New concept for the development of Bi-2212 wires for high-field applications

The first step towards high critical currents in Bi-2212 wires was recognizing that the supercurrent is blocked over long lengths by filament-diameter bubbles grown during the melt stage, which cause expansion of the wire diameter and dedensification of the superconducting filaments. While a succesful approach to reducing the problem of voids related to bubbles involved the application of a high overpressure during the heat treatment, we fabricated Bi-2212 wires by applying a new concept of suitably alternating groove-rolling and drawing techniques with the aim of densifying the phase during the working procedure prior to the heat treatment. We here for the first time were able to reach, in wires reacted with closed ends-i.e. with gas trapped in the wire as it happens in long length wires-the very same values of critical current shown in short wires reacted with open ends. This is the irrefutable evidence that, only by acting on the deformation technique, we were able to raise the critical current by properly densifying the superconducting powder inside the filaments already before the melt stage. Whole-conductor current densities in our long-length simulation wires already reach 400 A mm(-2) at 4.2 K and 5 T, which can be still easily increased through architecture optimization. The actual breakthrough is that the densification is optimized without further complex treatments through a technique which can be straightforwardly applied to long length wires.