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

Dr. Barbara Frei-Spreiter Appointed New CEO of RUAG International Holding AG and Beyond Gravity

By Phillipp Bircher With the appointment of Dr. Barbara Frei-Spreiter, RUAG International concludes the multi-stage search process to succeed André Wall as CEO of RUAG International and its space business, Beyond Gravity. Dr. Barbara Frei-Spreiter is a proven Swiss executive with over 25 years of international leadership experience in global...

Solving a Mystery in Dark Matter Detectors Could Improve Quantum Computers

By Lauren Biron Although dark matter makes up most of the mass in our universe, it has never been directly observed. To hunt for lighter dark matter and other rare phenomena, researchers must solve a puzzle in their supersensitive detectors: an unexpected number of low-energy events, called the “low-energy excess”...

How Argonne’s Aurora Supercomputer Is Opening up New Horizons for Fusion Energy Research

By Christina Nunez If you could build a star on Earth and harness its abundant energy, you’d need to know exactly how to store the star and keep it stable. Fusion energy scientists have been working for decades to make the idea a reality. They now have a potent new tool at...

Hydrogen Aviation Advances With Airbus and RWTH Aachen’s GENtwoPRO Fuel Cell Project

By Erin Kilgore If you’ve been tracking the future of hydrogen aviation, you know it’s a path packed with big ideas and tricky engineering puzzles. Now, Airbus and RWTH Aachen University have kicked off an Airbus RWTH Aachen partnership laser-focused on a near-term, high-impact goal: using scalable fuel cell technology to power regional aircraft. Early in Airbus’s hydrogen journey,...

World’s Most Powerful Particle Collider Upgrade Enters Next Phase with Giant Cold Boxes

By Georgina Jedikovska CERN engineers have transported two gleaming cryogenic “cold boxes” deep into the tunnels of the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HiLumi LHC), as part of the ambitious upgrade to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Lowered close to the ATLAS and CMS experiment detectors, the two giant pieces...

Dutch Project Quper Results in New Leiden Cryogenics Mini-fridge, Controlled by OrangeQS Juice Operating System

An inverted tabletop dilution refrigerator that can achieve millikelvin temperatures has long been the holy grail for fast-turnaround quantum technology development. It is especially useful for fast and affordable quantum chip testing. In 2023, Quantum Delta NL awarded funding to companies Leiden Cryogenics and Orange Quantum Systems for the Quper...

Latest in Defining Cryogenics

Joule-Thomson Effect

The Joule-Thomson (JT) effect is a thermodynamic process that occurs when a fluid expands from high pressure to low pressure at constant enthalpy (an isenthalpic process). Such a process can be approximated in the real world by expanding a fluid from high pressure to low pressure across a valve. Under...

Current Leads

One of the challenges of using superconducting magnets is the connection of the magnet to a room temperature power supply. This is accomplished via current leads. The trick is that current leads should ideally have a low heat leak, since they connect room temperature to cryogenic temperature, while at the...

Multilayer Insulation

Multilayer insulation (also referred to as superinsulation) is a key component in the reduction of heat leak to cryogenic systems due to thermal radiation. MLI consists of a series of uncooled reflective surfaces placed in the vacuum space between two surfaces, one warmer than the other. Generally speaking, for ideal...

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

In need of books to start a cryogenic engineering department

My company is going to create a cryogenic engineering department and we need some books in order to facilitate this project. This is the kind of information we would like to obtain from the books: 1- Calculations for determining the storage facilities, such as storage tanks, pumps, compressors, etc. 2-...

What does "n" stand for?

We have a picture where the various layers of a transfer line are labeled.

Having some difficulty with the design of a cryogenic pressure vessel

I am a graduate student in the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at West Virginia University. As a part of my research, I’m doing a case study of design of a Cryogenic Pressure Vessel. I’m facing a little difficulty in the process, and would be very grateful to you if you...

What's the difference between a cryocooler and a cryostat?

What’s the difference between a cryocooler and a cryostat?

CATEGORIES