THEVA is producing coated conductors for a wide range of applications from high current bus bars and cables to high field fusion magnets. In the presentation our recent developments in order to meet the different requirements for these applications will be presented.

 To produce coated conductors (CC) an all PVD approach is used with 50 µm or 100 µm thick Hastelloy® C276 substrates, two MgO buffer layers directly followed by the GdBaCuO HTS layer. Finally, Ag and Cu coatings are applied. Due to the inclined texture of the ISD MgO buffer layer the HTS layer grows in a unique manner where growth defects are terminated and won’t lead to a deterioration of the critical current density with film thickness. Consequently, the critical current can be increased linearly by increasing the HTS layer thickness.  Our main focus so far was stabilizing high process yield at moderate performance around 500 A/cm at 77K on long length tapes. Recently, we have taken advantage of the untapped potential by increasing the thickness by more than 50% and thus reached record values above 1000 A with test depositions on long tapes in standard production environment.

 In order to test the mechanical robustness of the coated conductors with increased HTS layer thickness and high Ic double bending tests were performed. The critical diameter at which I_C falls below 95% of the initial value was measured to be 3.1 ± 0.3 cm which is about 30% larger compared to our standard tape.

 For magnet applications the introduction of artificial pinning centres is a very common method for high performance conductors. This approach was also tested and very promising results with a critical current of over 950 A/cm at 20 K and 8 T compared to 400 A/cm in our standard tapes were achieved. The results will be show and discussed.

 Eventually, a brief overview on current application projects such as the SuperLink Munich cable project will be given.

Keywords: HTS wire, coated conductors, artificial pinning