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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....

Air Products and Linde North America Announce Joint Venture, will Build Industrial Gas Plant in Upstate NY

Linde North America has formed a new joint venture with Air Products named East Coast Nitrogen (ECN), through which the companies will build a new 1,100 ton per day world-scale air separation unit and industrial gas liquefier in Glenmont NY. An approximate capital investment of $60 million will be made...

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.

Latest in Defining Cryogenics

Helium-3

Helium-3 (3He) is one of the two stable isotopes of helium. The other is the much more common Helium-4 (4He). Neither of these isotopes should be confused with He II, which is the second liquid phase of 4He. He II was discussed in this column in the Spring 2010 edition...

Cryopumping

Cryopumping refers to the use of cryogenic temperatures to produce vacuum in enclosed spaces. More broadly, it can also refer to the removal of gases via cryogenic temperatures from a flow stream or enclosure without necessarily resulting in vacuum pressures. This is an important application of cryogenics and is used...

Thermal Acoustic Oscillations

Thermal Acoustic Oscillations (TAO) are a common event in cryogenic systems that can have significant adverse effects on the performance of the system. TAOs are sustained pressure oscillations that can occur in tubes containing gas, closed at one end (the warm end) that have a very large temperature gradient along...

Latest in Cryo Central

Cryogenic Electronics

Randall Kirschman, consulting physicist, Mountain View, California ExtElect@gmail.com Cryogenic electronics—the operation of electronic devices, circuits, and systems at cryogenic temperatures—has been a valuable technology for decades. Cryogenic electronics (also referred to as low-temperature electronics, or cold electronics) can be based on semiconductive devices, on superconductive devices, or on a combination...

Particle Physics: High Energy Physics

Cryogenics and High-Energy Physics 1. From symmetry magazine: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000627: Cryogenics is the study of how materials behave at temperatures near absolute zero. In high-energy particle accelerators, such frigid temperatures reduce the electrical resistance of wires in superconducting magnets, increasing the magnet strength and allowing faster particle acceleration. The same holds...

HTS Degaussing Systems

From the Spring 2009 issue of Cold Facts (Volume 25, Number 2): Thanks to a joint project by the US Navy and a number of industry partners, high temperature superconducting (HTS) technology is now at the heart of an advanced degaussing system aboard the USS Higgins at the naval station...

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

From http://www.superconductors.org: An area where superconductors can perform a life-saving function is in the field of biomagnetism. Doctors need a non-invasive means of determining what’s going on inside the human body. By impinging a strong superconductor-derived magnetic field into the body, hydrogen atoms that exist in the body’s water and...

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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