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ASC 2020 Is Ongoing

The organizers of the 2020 Applied Superconductivity Conference are presenting a completely virtual conference through November 7, 2020. The two-week format aims to accommodate international attendance and make viewing presentations convenient and easy to experience. https://ascinc.org/registration/

International Cryocooler Conference to Be Virtual-Only

Given the continuing COVID-19 pandemic with restrictions on travel and group meetings, the organizers of the International Cryocooler Conference (ICC) have moved the meeting date to December 7-10, 2020, as a totally virtual conference with no on-site attendance using Zoom® as the primary media. https://cryocooler.org

ITER Prepares Thermal Shield: The Ultimate Heat Barrier

In ITER's French Assembly Hall environment, a strange component shines like a freshly polished mirror. Lying horizontal, it looks like a giant's tiara; when upended to the vertical position and paired to its missing half, it will fit between the vacuum vessel and magnetic system of the machine and act...

#BlackinPhysics Week Builds Community, Increases Visibility

Walking to his lab one afternoon last year, physicist Charles Brown found his way blocked by a white student who refused to let him into the physics building and demanded to see his ID. A postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, studying ultracold atoms, Brown says the incident reflects...

RIX Cryocooler Tested, Accepted by US Navy for Aircraft Carrier Use

RIX Industries (CSA CSM) announced in August that it had supplied mission-critical cryocooler technology for shipboard pilot and medical applications onboard the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78). The company designs and manufactured a state-of-the-art liquid and gaseous oxygen generating plant that is now used onboard the ship.

Berkeley Lab Scientists Contribute to New Exploration of Higgs Boson Interactions

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 based on data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, scientists have been gathering new data on the Higgs particle and its associated Higgs field to understand how—and whether—it interacts with specific types of other particles. Released...

Latest in Defining Cryogenics

Two-Phase Flows

Two-phase flows are those flows in which there is a mixture of two physical states (solid, liquid or vapor). In cryogenic applications, such flows are almost always a mixture of a cryogenic liquid along with its corresponding vapor. A mixture of liquid helium and helium vapor would be a typical...

Supercritical Fluids

A supercritical fluid is defined as a substance whose temperature and pressure exceed those of its critical point. Every pure substance has a critical point that is defined in thermodynamic space by a critical temperature and a corresponding critical pressure. For example, the critical point for helium has a critical...

Brayton Cycle

The Brayton cycle is one of the many thermodynamic cycles used to generate cooling at cryogenic temperatures. Strictly speaking, when referring to cooling we should call this the reverse Brayton cycle as the original Brayton cycle describes the process of power generation or propulsion via a gas turbine. In many...

Latest in Cryo Central

Magnets

From “Superconductivity: Present and Future Applications” by the Coalition for the Commercial Application of Superconductors. Particle physics uses accelerators to recreate the conditions of the early universe in an attempt to piece together the complex puzzle of how we got to where we are today. These huge machines are used...

Energy Storage

From “Superconductivity: Present and Future Applications” by the Coalition for the Commercial Application of Superconductors. With power lines increasingly congested and prone to instability, strategic injection of brief bursts of real power can play a crucial role in maintaining grid reliability. Small-scale Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) systems, based on...

Astronomy

ASTRONOMY IN SPACE by Peter V. Mason, retired, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Visiting Associate, California Institute of Technology. Pmason@alumni.caltech.edu In thinking about the reasons to perform astronomy in space, we first consider the effect of the earth’s atmosphere. On a scale of decreasing energy, gamma rays, cosmic rays, X-rays and...

Cryocoolers

What is a Cryocooler? A mechanism that can extract heat from an object (cooler) and by doing so draw its temperature down below approximately 150 Kelvin (cryo). — (Courtesy Dr. Willy Gully) What is the difference between a Cryocooler and a Cryostat? A cryostat is any device designed to maintain...

Latest in Ask the Experts

An Issue of Pressure and Flow Rate in a Supply Tank

Please help solve this problem: A supply tank requires a vaporizer to generate sufficient pressure to pump stored fluid up into a vehicle or tank. The available head is limited as the tank level falls and it is important to minimize the system pressure drop to maintain the desired flow...

Using MLI on VJ Line Joints or Cryo Storage Tanks

When installing Multi Layer Insulation (MLI) blankets on VJ line joints or cryo storage tanks should they be wrapped and tied down tight or loose? These are usually pre-cut to size. Also should they have an access hole at the point of where the molecular sieve is installed to help...

Separated layers of ice over a pipe

I want to know that why there are different layers of ice over a pipe carrying a cryogenic fluid, each layer separated with clear marks / lines? What do these layers signify?

Using nitrogen as a cryogen

Is it possible to achieve -200˚C using nitrogen as a cryogen?

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