A high temperature superconductor and method of making and using same

A stack of HTS tapes (14) are bundled together, encapsulated with a silver or non-silver sheath (12) by a continuous tube filling and forming process without welding, and sintering to form the final product. A large current carrying conductor is achieved with the stacking of multiple HTS tapes. The bundling process is implemented using a continuous tube forming and filling process, which restacks round wires or flat tapes inside another tube. After restacking, the encapsulated tape is subjected to a conventional rolling operation to convert the tape to a desired thickness. For AC applications, a resistive barrier is introduced between HTS tapes to prevent coupling loss therebetween. To reduce sheath costs, a non-silver alloy may be used such as Cu-Al-Mn-Ni, stainless steel/nickel based compounds, like inconels, Cu-Ni, or Cu-Al. In one embodiment, an HTS tape is reinforced with an alloy strip by diffusion bonding and sintering in a single step. The backing strip is placed on the outside of the winding such that most of the tape is placed in compression when made to follow a tortious path.