Effect of strain on grain and grain-boundary critical currents of YBCO coated conductors

We present a comparative analysis on tensile strain tolerance of critical currents for IBAD and RABiTS coated conductors. These measurements have been performed with a recently developed methodology based on dc-magnetization measurements, which enables us to analyze the grain and grain-boundary critical current densities simultaneously. We show that the percolative grain-boundary critical current density may be reduced by 50% with deformations of /spl epsiv//spl sim/0.32% and 1% for RABiTS and IBAD, respectively, while the grain critical current and thus the pinning properties of the grains are not affected by the deformation process.