Cold Facts Digital – The go-to place for Cryogenics and Superconductivity

28th Space Cryogenics Workshop

CSA and NASA’s Cryogenics Technical Discipline Team announce the 28th Space Cryogenics Workshop, to be held July 17-19, 2019, at the Heritage Hotel, Southbury CT. All aspects of space cryogenics will be represented, with an emphasis on those related to space exploration.

ISRU Research Holds Promise for Space Exploration

First explored for cryogenic use in space exploration, ISRU has expanded further and today involves hardware and operations that harness and utilize local in-situ resources to create products and services for robotic and human exploration.

Start Your Cryogenics Career with a Boom!

Dr. Jacob Leachman never got to meet Dr. Boom, but says he got to know him through a legacy of accomplishments, including Boom's passion for inspiring students to enter the field.

CERN FCC Study Explores Cooling Requirements For Future Circular Colliders

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful collider with planned operation through the mid 2030s. Therefore, it is timely to design a future collider that could identify physics beyond the standard model and help us explain the open questions about our universe.

CSA Certifies Newly Elected Officers, Directors

CSA board certified results of its 2018 election at the meeting held during the Applied Superconductivity Conference in Seattle.

Physicists Uncover State of Matter in Superconducting Material

A team from Ames Laboratory and the University of Alabama Birmingham has discovered a remarkable new state of matter within an iron pnictide superconductor, revealing a laser-induced formation of collective behaviors that compete with superconductivity around 16 K.

Latest in Defining Cryogenics

Space Cryogenics

Space cryogenics is, somewhat obviously, the application of cryogenics to space exploration and science. The use of cryogenics in space optimizes the launching of vehicles, provides power and life support to spacecraft and is critical for many scientific observations.Space cryogenics has a number of challenges and has driven both pure...

Exergy

The science of thermodynamics plays a major role in cryogenics. It underlies the various refrigeration cycles, from Carnot to Brayton (Cold Facts Vol. 32 No. 2) and Joule-Thomson, is a fundamental part of the definition of terms such as coefficient of performance (Cold Facts Vol. 31 No. 1) and even...

Cryogenic Treatment

Cryogenic treatment is the process of cooling materials to cryogenic temperatures temporarily to improve their material properties at room temperature. This is distinct from cooling materials down to cryogenic temperatures to take advantage of phenomena such as superconductivity that only occur at cryogenic temperatures. Cryogenic treatment, sometimes also referred to...

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?

CATEGORIES