Just something beautiful...

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I made some superconductors once, about 10 years old they worked really well and floated beautifully. got the recipe for Ytrium Barium Copper. All I remember is mixing it up, pressing it and cooking it in a furnace for days. it was quite straightfoward once you have found a suitable furnace. Liquid nitrogen is harder to come by.

Theres lots of recipes online that take you through it.

If you've got a local physics dept in a university nearby, or a science centre or museum, you might find someone with access to some liquid nitrogen that might help test. Maybe.

The artist of Freefall put it all in one nice 'toon.

"Freefall" - (c) 1999

Last edited by Fnord on 25 Oct 2011, 10:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.

i know a molecular biologist undergrad in odense university, i should ask her.

as i understand it you would actually need a substrate for the ytrrium alloy,

anyway i imagine the whole setup would take quite some time to get started, i would need to desinn a mold that can befilled and then pressed, in itself not easy.
though i dont know if it could be done with a hydraulic jack, we have some quite powerfull ones for lifting where i work, they can jack up at least 50t, making a press out of them would require a heavy framework though.

Can you make a 1 micron thick coating that way, or are you talking about making normal run-of-the-mill superconductors?

For high quality thin films it seems a popular way is a chemical deposition process using organometallic precursors. Apparently these methods don't require a vacuum and conversion temperature is only around 700 degC. I think you need an oxygen controlled atmosphere for the heat treating though. Coincidentally I met a guy recently that runs a metal factory and specializes in copper alloys. So they have controlled atmosphere furnaces for special annealing processes. Hmmm, maybe it's possible to do this.