Role of mechanical deformation in the texturing of coated conductor composites

Ni and Ni-based alloys have received considerable attention as the substrates for HTS coated conductors. A critical step in the successful fabrication of coated conductor composites on metal substrates is to produce cube texture by mechanical deformation using the rolling assisted biaxial textured substrate (RABiTS) approach. In this paper, we investigated the effects of mechanical deformation and heat treatment on the growth of texture in nickel and nickel-tungsten alloys with the objective of understanding mechanisms of mechanical texturing in coated conductor substrates. The results show that the sharpest cube texture is obtained by cold rolling nickel and nickel tungsten alloys in passes of less than 5% deformation followed by annealing at high temperature.