Effects of rolling deformation processes on the properties of Ag-sheathed Sr1−xKxFe2As2 superconducting tapes

• The rolling deformation process on the properties of Ag-sheathed iron-based superconducting tapes is studied.
• The properties of tapes rolled by 3 passes exhibit an attractive performance.
• Cutting the number of rolling passes down to 3 is more advantageous to the large-scale producing in the future.

The powder-in-tube method is widely used in fabricating iron-based superconducting wires and tapes. To make tapes, a multi-pass rolling process is usually adopted. However, the multi-pass rolling process limits the efficiency of tapes. In this work, rolling deformation technique was studied systematically by fabricating Sr1−xKxFe2As2 superconducting tapes. The total rolling reduction ratio is about 80% and the difference of superconducting performance of tapes rolled by 2, 3, 5 and 7 passes has been investigated. The critical current density Jc, Vickers micro-hardness and microstructure of the superconducting core indicate that tapes after 2, 3, 5 and 7 rolling passes exhibit a similar trend. The width of the tapes and the area of superconducting cores increase with decreasing the number of rolling passes, but the transport Jc of tapes after different rolling passes seems to be the same, except for the tape rolled by 2 passes, whose transport Jc is lower than the other tapes. Concerning the geometry uniformity for the superconducting cores, the sausaging phenomenon was not observed from the photograph of longitudinal cross-section of all the samples. “Lobes” phenomenon on transverse cross-section can be suppressed through decreasing the rolling passes. Therefore, we can obtain uniform and high-performance Ag-sheathed iron-based superconducting tapes by cutting the number of rolling passes down to 3, which is more advantageous to the large-scale producing in the future.