The effect of Ni doping in powder-in-tube-MgB2 material

In this study, MgB2 in-situ method has been made using Stainless Steel (SS-316L) tube as a tube sealed with powders of preliminary materials of Magnesium, Boron, and Nickel. The effect of Ni dopant to microstructure and properties of MgB2 manufactured using Powder-In-Tube (PIT) technique were analyzed. The whole samples were formulated with variations of Ni doped for 5 and 10 wt.%. The samples were sintered at two temperatures of 700 °C and 800 °C for 3 h. In most recent studies, all samples have been measured in three different ways. First, all samples were examined using a cryogenic system to analyze their critical temperature. Second, all samples were analyzed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to observe their surface morphology. Third, all samples were analyzed using an X-ray diffractometer (XRD) to determine formed phases and crystallized size. In this study, comparing nickel doped-MgB2 with variation sintering temperature showed that the highest difference in Tc onset and Tc zero is 20.35 K on sample with 10% addition of Ni and sintered at 800°C (N2). The results of the morphological study did not show any morphological surface change in nickel doping in powder-in-tube-MgB2 material. The most obvious finding to emerge from the X-ray diffraction analysis is that the highest weight fraction of superconducting MgB2 was 94.7 wt. % in the N2 sample. Further research should be undertaken to investigate nickel doping in powder-in-tube-MgB2 materials using a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID).