ADVERTISEMENT

Air Liquide Picks Lydall for ITER Project

Air Liquide advanced Technologies has chosen Lydall Performance Materials to supply insulation for cryogenic lines the company is manufacturing for the ITER fusion machine. Both are CSA Corporate Sustaining Members. ITER engineers use extreme low temperature to cool the superconducting magnets needed to confine and stabilize the machine's fusion reaction....

Illini Physicists Develop Superconducting Nanoscale Memory Cell

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a new nanoscale memory cell that provides stable memory at a smaller size than other proposed memory devices and holds tremendous promise for successful integration with superconducting processors.

Chart Announces Sale of Qdrive Technologies

Chart Industries, Inc. (CSA CSM) has completed the sale of certain assets related to its Qdrive® set of products to RIX Industries. For the past several years Chart has developed and supplied QDrive technologies to RIX in support of liquid oxygen systems for military applications. Qdrive operations currently located in...

HYPRES Launches New Subsidiary, Expands Efforts in Quantum Computing

HYPRES, a CSA CSM known as the Digital Superconductor Company, has launched Superconducting Energy Efficient Quantum Computing, or SeeQC, a wholly owned subsidiary headquartered in Rome. SeeQC will focus on developing superconducting technologies for a variety of applications, including scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing, quantum communications and quantum simulators. The company...

Cleaning the LHC, Where Air Particles Count as Dirt

Inside the Large Hadron Collider, beams of particles sprint 17 miles around in opposite directions through a pair of evacuated beam pipes. The interior of the pipes needs to be spotless, but it’s not dirt or grime that clogs the LHC—it’s microscopic air molecules.

ADVERTISEMENT

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...

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...

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...