NASA Telescopes face budget crisis
As the Space Shuttle made its final flight, another arm of the US space program faces a bleak future.
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Dippin’ Dots reacts to the marketplace
Would you like your coffee regular, black or pelletized? The question is important to the makers of Dippin’ Dots, those supercold beads of ice cream that are sold largely at ballparks and amusement parks and have become a staple of childhood summers.
CERN/ITER collaboration rescues Japanese magnet project
The iter newsline reports that when the March 2011 earthquake that devastated Japan dramatically disrupted a quality control step in the manufacturing process of the superconducting wires for the ITER magnets, swift action by CERN allowed the verification process to proceed.
US ITER SC magnet contract goes to General Atomics
The US ITER Project Office at Oak Ridge National Laboratory competitively awarded a multi-year contract to General Atomics to produce superconducting magnets for the central solenoid of ITER, an experimental fusion facility that aims to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy for the commercial power grid.
US Helium Reserve nearing depletion
Officials at the Federal Helium Reserve, the source of almost half of the US helium supply and more than a third of the world's, say that the reserve could exhaust its supply by 2020.
Hints of Higgs boson detected at Tevatron, LHC
Scientists of the CDF and DZero collaborations at Fermilab continue to increase the sensitivity of their Tevatron experiments to the Higgs particle and narrow the range in which the particle seems to be hiding.
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Mixed Refrigerant Cycles
Most cryogenic refrigeration systems, both large scale systems and cryocoolers, use helium as a working fluid. There are a number of advantages to helium, not the least of which is that helium remains a fluid down to the lowest achievable temperatures. In order to freeze helium, pressures of over 20...
Fountain Pumps and He II Phase Separators
Helium II (He II), the second liquid phase of the 4He isotope described in this column in Cold Facts Spring 2010 (http://2csa.us/he2), can be modeled as consisting of two interpenetrating fluids. One, the superfluid component, has zero viscosity and entropy and the other, the normal fluid component, has nonzero viscosity...
Turboexpanders
A vital technology in the refrigerators and liquefiers described in Cold Facts Volume 31 Number 3 is that of turboexpanders. These devices are rotating machines in which the process fluid (e.g., helium) does work against the turboexpander while moving from high pressure to a lower pressure and thus is cooled....
Primary Standards
Elie K. Track Hypres, Inc. elie@hypres.com http://www.hypres.com/ Primary standards involve the exact definition and realization of units of measurement for various quantities, time, length, mass, voltage, resistance, current, etc. International agreements based on the latest scientific knowledge define those units, and their realizations vary depending on the unit itself. For...
Shrink Fitting
Robin A. Rhodes Cryogenic Institute of New England, Inc. rrhodes@nitrofreeze.com Shrink fitting, (or “compression fitting” as it is sometimes called), is a method used to insert a pin or bushing into a housing or other assembly requiring an extremely tight tolerance fit. It can be used as an alternative to...
Telecommunications
From the Winter 2004 issue of Cold Facts magazine The recent M-Calc IV — 4th Industry Assessment workshop discussing military and commercial applications for low-cost cryocoolers, held in November in San Diego, highlighted progress being made in cryogenics as applied in telecommunications. The reliability and long lifetime of projects now...
Wind Tunnels
Dr. Robert Kilgore The development of the cryogenic wind tunnel is one of many significant breakthroughs in both cryogenics and wind-tunnel technology made during the past millennium. Interest in the development of high-speed commercial and military aircraft resulted in a review of problems of flow simulation in transonic wind tunnels...
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?