Next Generation Wire research in Japan

Since 1998, ISTEC-SRT and NEDO have been supporting areas of Japanese research through the Development of Fundamental Technologies for Superconductivity Applications Project. Recently, it was announced that efforts on high temperature superconducting wire development systems will be reinforced and restructured to improve and accelerate research and development in this area with the help of seven participating companies. The companies include: Sumitomo Electric Industries, Tokyo Electric Power Company, Fujikura, Chubu Electric Power Company, Furukawa Electric Company, Toshiba, and Showa Electric Wire and Cable. The budget for the project is 3.2 billion yen for 1999. This represents a large increase over the 700 million yen budget for the previous year.

Next Generation Wires refers to high temperature superconducting wires made of RE123, for example Y123 or Nd123 that have superior performance in high magnetic fields at 77K compared to the Bi system superconductors. The project aims to study the techniques of fabricating 1000 m long wires of RE123 system materials, to develop methods for fabricating the wires on a practical scale, and to establish these techniques by 2002. Developments will focus on the search for proper materials for the substrate, buffer layer and superconducting layer, and techniques to fabricate each layer. The desire is to fabricate substrates for various materials and buffer layers to prevent from cracking and give superconducting layers in-plane epitaxy. The techniques for high-speed fabrication of thick superconducting layers using the gas-phase and liquid-phase methods will be examined.

The above news was provided by Dr. Furuto, Executive Chief Editor for SuperCom of the Superconductivity Communication Committee. This committee is a non-profit organization supported and directed by Prof. K. Kitazawa, University of Tokyo. It acts to release information on R&D results recently obtained in various superconductivity projects going on in Japan, and stimulates researchers in this field as well as people working in areas outside of superconductivity.