Growth of melt-textured Y1Ba2Cu3O7-delta

A growth model is proposed to explain the growth of highly textured melt-processed Y-123. These considerations take into account the anisotropic growth and distinguish between the growth rate and the processing rate. Due to the anisotropic growth of Y-123, differently oriented grains grow with different speeds parallel to the direction of the temparature gradient, <(del)over right arrow>T. During the growth process grains with fast growing crystal directions surround grains with slow growing crystal directions and stop the latter. Therefore, a selection between differently oriented grains occur during the growth process. While other models only consider the growth of the fast growing ab-planes parallel to the temperature gradient, this modified growth model could explain the observed growth of Y-123 textured with the c axis parallel to the <(del)over right arrow>T.