Transport critical current density in Fe-sheathed nano-SiC doped MgB/sub 2/ wires

S. X. Dou, University of Wollongong
J. Horvat, University of Wollongong
S. Soltanian, University of Wollongong
X. L. Wang, University of Wollongong
M. J. Qin, University of Wollongong
S. H. Zhou, University of Wollongong
H. K. Liu, University of Wollongong
P. G. Munroe, University of New South Wales

Article comments

This article was originally published as: Dou, SX, Horvat, J, Soltanian, S et al, Transport critical current density in Fe-sheathed nano-SiC doped MgB/sub 2/ wires, IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity, June 2003, 13(2)3, 3199-3202. Copyright IEEE 2003.

Abstract

The nano-SiC doped MgB/sub 2//Fe wires were fabricated using a powder-in-tube method and an in-situ reaction process. The depression of T/sub c/ with increasing SiC doping level remained rather small due to the counterbalanced effect of Si and C co-doping. The high level SiC co-doping allowed creation of the intra-grain defects and nano-inclusions, which act as effective pinning centers, resulting in a substantial enhancement in the J/sub c/(H) performance. The transport J/sub c/ for all the wires is comparable to the magnetic J/sub c/ at higher fields despite the low density of the samples and percolative nature of current. The transport I/sub c/ for the 10wt% SiC doped MgB/sub 2//Fe reached 660A at 5K and 4.5T (J/sub c/=133000A/cm/sup 2/) and 540A at 20K and 2T (J/sub c/=108000A/cm/sup 2/). The transport J/sub c/ for the 10wt% SiC doped MgB/sub 2/ wire is more than an order of magnitude higher than for the state-the-art Fe-sheathed MgB/sub 2/ wire reported to date at 5K and 10T and 20K and 5T respectively. There is a plenty of room for further improvement in J/sub c/ as the density of the current samples is only 50%.