Effects of stress on critical current in V3Ga tape

For the generation of magnetic field less than 8T NbTi conductors have been used with considerable reliability. For the higher field (which is strongly expected for advanced SCM in near future) compound type superconductors such as Nb3Sn or V3Ga are to be used. These compound superconducting materials are, however, intrinsically brittle, so that it has been said that considerable degradation cannot be avoided, if they are subjected to certain amount of strain say, --0.1%. This is the main reason that compound superconducting materials have been hesitated to the application to the LARGE magnets. To give a clearer insight to the problem we have studied stress/strain degradation effects on commercially available superconducting V3Ga tape using specially designed apparatus by making ''in situ'' experiment, i.e. 1) in liquid He, 2) with external magnetic field, 3) with current in the conductor and 4) with stresses. An interesting and very important results were obtained that the critical current density increases with stress (or strain) at the first stage and degraded drastically after the sample is strained higher than about ''one percent''. (author)