To date, additive manufacturing techniques are increasingly used by manufacturers to produce parts. On the one hand, these techniques allow for the fabrication of very complex shapes, reduce manufacturing time and reduce the amount of material required compared to conventional machining techniques. However, these new techniques are most often used for the manufacture of structural materials (mechanical parts), so it is very interesting to use materials possessing particular physical properties for specific applications. For example, superconductivity can be mentioned.

Superconductivity is a particular physical property of certain materials that when placed under a temperature below their critical temperature (Tc) makes them perfectly electrically conductive (suppression of the Joule effect, which is interesting from a point of view of current transport [i]) but also perfectly diamagnetic, which allows them to levitate around magnets (which can be used in certain types of applications such as MAGLEV type trains). These materials are also used to generate intense magnetic fields (superconducting coils) that can be found today in MRIs, NMRs, and that we can find in the electric motors of future aircraft [2]. The shaping possibilities are a key factor in the development of devices for these applications that would significantly reduce the costs of these devices and thus increase the development of these technologies in the near future.

During this postdoctoral fellowship, you will work on the elaboration of parts made of a superconducting material using additive manufacturing techniques (in particular Selective Laser Sintering) and also apply finishing treatments on the parts [Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS), oven]. You will also characterize the structural, microstructural and physical properties of the parts using XRD, microscopies and tomography techniques. The superconducting phase must be not degraded after the manufacturing step and its presence will be systematically checked by XRD analysis. The superconducting properties will be studied by collaborations which could implicate the postdoc fellow. The experiments will be correlated to a physical model developed with COMSOL software (laser/matter interaction for an identification of the additive manufacturing parameter range and thermal model to determine the best part shapes for an efficient cooling).