Improvement of production rate of YBCO coated conductors fabricated by TFA-MOD method

The metal-organic deposition (MOD) method using trifluoroacetate (TFA) salts is considered to be an effective method for inexpensively fabricating YBa2Cu3O7-y (YBCO) coated conductors with high critical current density property. The long-length TFA-MOD YBCO coated conductors have been fabricated by multi-turn reel-to-reel system. Increasing the thickness per single coating in the multi-turn reel-to-reel system is a cost-effective technique for fabrication of the precursor films in the calcination process since it reduces the number of coatings and shortens the processing time. In this work, we have developed a new starting solution consisting of non-fluorine salts of yttrium propionate and copper 2-ethylhexanoate with focusing on increasing the thickness per single coating for a high-rate fabrication of the YBCO coated conductors by the TFA-MOD method. The critical thickness per single coating of the precursor film fabricated from the new starting solution was improved to 0.44 mu m/coat. Furthermore, the addition of diacetoneacrylamide in the new starting solution increased the critical thickness per single coating to 0.79 mu m/coat. High critical current of 791 A/cm-width with high critical current density of 2.7 MA/cm(2) was obtained using the new starting solution with diacetoneacrylamide at the thickness per single coating of 0.49 mu m/coat. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.