Materials characteristics of a single grained Y-Ba-Cu-O superconductor

Single grained Y-Ba-Cu-O superconducting material has demonstrated its unique magnetic properties, such as strong flux trapping (up to 10 T at 40 K) and strong flux shielding (up to 18 T at 4 K) by eliminating the grain boundary weak link and improving the flux pinning effect. This improvement of magnetic properties in YBCO superconductors is due to the advance of materials processing techniques, i.e., top-seeding and melt-texturing method. With the TSMT method, single grained YBCO samples up to several centimeters in diameter can be produced with very high reproducibility. In this report, the TSMT method will be introduced. The results of the TSMT-YBCO sample's superconducting properties, i.e., magnetic field intensity and distribution uniformity, levitation force, etc., as well as their correlation with various materials processing methods will be discussed. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physics.