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With the first tokamak designed for full nuclear operation now well into final assembly (ITER), and a major new research tokamak starting commissioning (JT60SA), nuclear fusion is becoming a mainstream potential energy source for the future. A critical part of the viability of magnetic confinement for fusion is superconductor technology. The experience gained and lessons learned in the application of this technology to ITER and JT60SA, together with new and improved superconducting materials, is opening multiple routes to commercial fusion reactors. The objective of this roadmap is, through a series of short articles, to outline some of these routes and the materials/technologies that go with them.

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The bcc supersaturated solid solution Nb(Al)ss obtained by rapid heating and quenching of a multifilamentary Nb/Al composite wire has shown a crystal structure change from a disordered to an ordered structure before transforming to the A15 Nb3Al phase. Such ordering of the bcc phase seems to be responsible for the A15 phase stacking faults that depress the critical temperature (Tc), the upper critical magnetic field (Bc2) and, hence, the critical current density (Jc) of Nb3Al in high fields. A heat treatment around 1000 °C, higher than conventional transformation temperatures by about 200 °C, suppresses the ordering and yields a new phenomenon termed the `transformation-heat-based up-quenching' (TRUQ). TRUQ is characterized by the self-heating of the bcc phase by the transformation heat, which propagates through the whole length of a composite wire and transforms it to Nb3Al. A subsequent annealing at 800 °C enhances the long-range ordering of the Nb3Al phase and drastically improves the high-field critical current densities of the Nb3Al conductors.

The strain dependence of not only the critical current (I c ) but also the n-value in technical Nb 3 Al wires prepared with the rapid-heating, quenching and transformation (RHQT) method has been measured with the modified Walters spring (WASP), which allows us to measure the voltage-current relation down to less than the 0.1 µV cm −1 criterion, an important requirement in view of the applications like NMR spectroscopy operated in a persistent current mode.

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