CAN SUPERCONDUCTORS has been supplying REBCO HTS bulk parts to market for 25 years. In 2021 the company produces more than 6,000 HTS bulk parts in various shapes, sizes and composition. The in-house production of HTS material is reaching 2 tons (including powders and granulates used as precursors) in total. We continuously develop and improve batch processes for REBCO bulks for industrial applications. Our current installed production capacity is close to 3.5 t of REBCO material per year.
Industrial use of HTS products requires strict quality control and since some large customers can only purchase from quality certified suppliers, CAN recently implemented ISO 9001 and we had our HTS preparation processes certified. During the ISO implementation a sophisticated system was implemented, allowing full traceability of every step of our bulk production process all the way down to the raw materials used.
Our REBCO bulks have successfully been used in many experimental applications by R&D teams all around the world. Since 2006 we have regularly been supplying YBCO disks for the first real commercial application of HTS bulks: the LevMixerTM by PALL – a lifescience application using the effect of frictionless mixing. More than 10,000 CAN bulks have been supplied.
CAN develops bulks which meet requirements of all types of potential applications: cheaper YBCO bulks namely for interaction with permanent magnets and levitation-based use as well as Gd and Eu based bulks for applications using high trapped magnetic fields such as NMR, MRI. The current range as well as planned range of bulks will be introduced.
Latest results of efforts to improve mechanical properties of bulks both using various enhancement methods (SiC fibre-enhancement and multiple artificial holes introduction) will also be presented as well as challenges for next years to come to bring more HTS bulks to market.
Keywords: HTS bulk , YBCO, GdBCO, EuBCO