The making of a superconductor will take time to allow the bonding of the materials. Our materials are Yttrium Oxide, Cooper Oxide, and Barium Carbonate. We weighted and grinded the materials to obtain an homogenous mixture. After grinding the materials, we compacted them in 10mm pellets using a press. Once the pellets were pressed; we heated the pellets using a tube furnace. For that, I used Olympus, the nickname of the tube furnace. It may look simple; however it had to be programmed using a ramp. The first 4 hours the temperature would rise from room temperature to 900ºC, then maintain the temperature at 900ºC for 12hours, to finally descend to room temperature in 8 hours; all the time the tube receives oxygen from a tank to allow the bonding, since the materials would release CO2 while being heated inside the tube.
The objective is to go from:
Y2O3 + 6CuO + 4BaCO3 → 2YBa2Cu3O7 + 4CO2
After the process, we XRD the material again, the process needs to be repeated until the materials are completely bonded. The material changed the color from gray to green during the first process; now it looks almost black/dark gray.
Today, we are going to analyze it again in the XRD to check the diffraction pattern.
Oh wow, Daniel! This looks amazing!
What are your lab’s goal targets? For example, in the video you had a small container that had some type of liquid-looking substance in it. How much do you want to extract in order to proceed?
Thanks,
The little container is a filter. The crystal tube has inside 2 grams of the material. On one side of the plug, the oxygen is being pumped inside the chamber, while the output of the gases are filtered through the Erlenmeyer vase filled with mineral oil in order to trap any harmful vapor released. The next step is to test the resistivity of the samples. By the way they were two pellets 10 mm in diameter by 4 mm thick. So, our goal is to build a track to demonstrate the superconductivity.
This seems really cool. What are you trying to accomplish when it takes 8 hours to cool the materials?
Turning this into an elementary school lesson is going to be fun.