Industrial manufacturing process for a high temperature superconducting coated conductors technology
Coated conductors (CCs), known as the second generation of high temperature superconductors (2G-HTS), have triggered broad and fruitful R&D efforts to ensure industrial scalability and enable wide market adoption. Major challenges currently limit the practical use of HTS conductors. First, the high cost / performance ratio imposed by the fabrication methods of kilometre-lengths epitaxial YBCO films that work at too low growth rates limits CC manufacturing throughput. Second, the low throughput in the production of CCs leads to a severe limitation in generating drastic cost reductions for CCs, required for wide market implementation. Due to overall cost, today it remains inefficient to unlock the potential of large-scale applications such as wind turbines, highly efficient and compact industrial scale generators, Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage and advanced HTS MRI/RMN machines. The overall objective of this Proof of Concept (PoC) proposal is to demonstrate the commercial relevance and to build a business strategy for the industrial scale-up of a new manufacturing process for HTS films, which will push the emerging HTS industry to full market adoption. IMPACT combines low cost (CSD), high throughput (TLA ultrafast growth) and high performance (strained nanocomposites), by integrating additive manufacturing processes and digital printing, to deliver a commercially relevant and industry scalable manufacturing process for HTS CCs. Our value creation process is focused on several inflection points which will pave the way towards commercial implementation of our novel manufacturing process. At the end of IMPACT, we aim to capture value by having identified the commercial exploitation strategies of our technology.