Probing of the internal damage morphology in multilayered high-temperature superconducting wires

The second generation HTS wires have been used in many superconducting components of electrical engineering after they were fabricated. New challenge what we face to is how the damages occur in such wires with multi-layer structure under both mechanical and extreme environment, which also dominates their quality. In this work, a macroscale technique combined a real-time magneto-optical imaging with a cryogenic uniaxial-tensile loading system was established to investigate the damage behavior accompanied with magnetic flux evolution. Under a low speed of tensile strain, it was found that the local magnetic flux moves gradually to form intermittent multi-stack spindle penetrations, which corresponds to the cracks initiated from substrate and extend along both tape thickness and width directions, where the amorphous phases at the tip of cracks were also observed. The obtained results reveal the mechanism of damage formation and provide a potential orientation for improving mechanical quality of these wires. Damage that occurs in second generation high-temperature-superconducting wires is problematic. Here, the authors present real-time magnetic flux behaviour in these wires under tensile strain and reveal damage evolution, including the amorphous phase in the superconducting layer acting in crack blunting during tension