Superconducting magnets used for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners need to keep temperature gradients minimized in order to retain thermal and operating current margin. We have used 3D finite element analysis (FEA) simulation in COMSOL Multiphysics software that includes both conductive heat transfer and radiative heating to calculate the temperature distribution both along the winding direction and across the cross-section of an MRI segment coil at its equilibrium operating temperature. We have also modelled the evolution of the thermal properties during cool-down from ambient temperature. The heat capacity and thermal conductivity of the magnet winding were computed for use within this simulation. The heat capacity as a function of temperature was calculated using a rule of mixtures. This procedure was also used for the thermal conductivity along the direction of the wire. However, the thermal conductivity within the composite cross section (- and -directions) was computed using a 2D FEA model. Based on this, a time-dependent, 3D coil model was built to calculate the coil temperature throughout the winding during cool-down in our test cryostat system. The model included a heat leak component to the coil current contacts via conduction through the current leads as well as a radiative component from the surfaces of the cryostat. A key result was that a maximum coil Δ = 5.1 K (=maximum temperature within the winding -minimum temperature in the winding) was seen and a coil margin of 12.75 A was predicted at steady state, with our first current lead design. A second set of more optimized current leads significantly lowered the Δ within the coil at the steady state. The coil margin has been analyzed for different current lead designs.

The second-stage regenerators of pulse tube refrigerators (PTRs) are routinely used to intercept heat loads without disturbing cooling at their base temperatures, often near 4 K. Gifford-McMahon cryocoolers (GMCs) have not yet demonstrated a similar capability to provide regenerator cooling, possibly because of the thermal resistance between their regenerator shell and core. Here we show that GMCs do have capacity to provide regenerator cooling when heat loads are applied directly on the outer regenerator shell, although to a lesser extent compared to PTRs of similar cooling capacity. For example, we intercepted a 900 mW heat load at 21.6 K using the second-stage regenerator of a GMC while only giving up 10 mW of cooling at 3 K (out of 270 mW). This performance may possibly be improved by optimizing heat exchange between heat source and regenerator shell. We provide detailed temperature profile measurements from both a GMC and a PTR while applying heat to the regenerators, showing distinct behavior between the two. We also show that for GMCs, the optimal location of heat injection should be farther from the cold end than for PTRs. Although the physical source of regenerator cooling is less clear for GMCs than it is for PTRs, a useful amount of cooling is available and warrants further study.

With the emerging recognition of open scientific hardware, rapid prototyping technology such as three-dimensional (3-D) printing is becoming widely available for fields such as cryobiology, and cryopreservation, where material selection for instruments and hardware has traditionally been problematic due to extreme low temperatures. A better understanding of the mechanical properties of 3-D printing thermoplastics at cryogenic temperatures is essential to material selection, part design, and printing optimization. The goal of the present study was to explore the feasibility of development for a 3-D printed device ('CryoTensileDevice') to hold a test specimen in liquid nitrogen and be mounted in standard mechanical testing systems to evaluate 3-D printing material behaviors at cryogenic temperatures. The CryoTensileDevice was prototyped with flexible filaments with a per-unit material cost of < US$5 and a printing time of < 5 h. The commonly used printing filament polylactic acid (PLA) was selected to evaluate the utility of the CryoTensileDevice. At room temperature, the CryoTensileDevice did not significantly ( > 0.05) affect PLA tensile measurements such as Young's modulus, yield stress, yield strain, stress at break, or strain at break. With the CryoTensileDevice, specimens 3-D printed with PLA at 50%, 75%, and 100% infill rates had comparable tensile properties when tested at room and liquid nitrogen temperatures. The PLA showed superior performance in tensile properties in comparison to acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). This device can assist characterization of 3-D printing approaches for cryogenic work, and opens a pathway for future innovations to create a variety of 3-D printed devices to study a wide range of material properties for cryogenic applications.

In support of NASA's Triton Hopper project, mechanical response data for solid nitrogen are needed for concept validation and development. Available mechanical properties data is sparse with only three known indentation measurements existing between 30 and 40 K. To generate more data, a custom instrumented hardness tester was developed to interface with a cryostat. The system was used to conduct cylindrical punch indentation testing at Triton-relevant thermodynamic conditions. Pressure versus displacement curves and hardness values were obtained. In the experiments the hardness ranged between about 2 kg/mm and 0.5 kg/mm in the aforementioned temperature range. A suspected brittle fracture is observed at lower temperatures in the range.

Mechanical analysis of the stress and strains developed in the coils were calculated for a ten coil 1.5 T MRI magnet design with magnesium diboride (MgB) wire protected with Coupling Loss Induced Quench (CLIQ). The temperature distribution inside the coils was first simulated in MATLAB to solve the governing heat and circuit equations. Simulations were performed on the magnet, in which each coil was divided into two subsections, with two CLIQ units while the capacitor ranged from 5 to 20 mF and the initial charging voltage ranged from 2.6 kV to 1.3 kV in order to keep the total stored energy in the CLIQ system constant. The wire's filamentary twist pitch remained constant at 5 cm for all simulations. The exported temperature distribution was expanded to form a representative unit cell (RUC) representing the wire composite and then imported into ANSYS to calculate the 1 principle strain in the MgB filament and shear stress across the epoxy for the coils. A peak temperature of 191 K occurred inside the coil with the initial quench when the CLIQ unit had a 20 mF capacitor charged to 1.3 kV. According to the mechanical simulations, the largest resulting peak strain in the wire was 0.034%, and peak shear stress was 44 MPa.

Described herein is a comprehensive project-a large-scale test of an integrated refrigeration and storage system called the Ground Operations and Demonstration Unit for Liquid Hydrogen (GODU LH2), sponsored by the Advanced Exploration Systems Program and constructed at Kennedy Space Center. A commercial cryogenic refrigerator interfaced with a 125,000 liter liquid hydrogen tank and auxiliary systems in a manner that enabled control of the propellant state by extracting heat via a closed loop Brayton cycle refrigerator coupled to a novel internal heat exchanger. Three primary objectives were demonstrating zero-loss storage and transfer, gaseous liquefaction, and propellant densification. Testing was performed at three different liquid hydrogen fill-levels. Data were collected on tank pressure, internal tank temperature profiles, mass flow in and out of the system, and refrigeration system performance. All test objectives were successfully achieved during approximately two years of testing. A summary of the final results is presented in this paper.

Spacecraft and instruments on space missions are built using a wide variety of carefully-chosen materials. It is common for NASA engineers to propose new candidate materials which have not been totally characterized at cryogenic temperatures. In many cases a material's cryogenic thermal conductivity must be known before selecting it for a specific space-flight application. We developed a test facility in 2004 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to measure the longitudinal thermal conductivity of materials at temperatures between 4 and 300 Kelvin, and we have characterized many candidate materials since then. The measurement technique is not extremely complex, but proper care to details of the setup, data acquisition and data reduction is necessary for high precision and accuracy. We describe the thermal conductivity measurement process and present results for ten engineered materials, including alloys, polymers, composites, and a ceramic.

A 3-stage adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator (ADR)[1] is used on the Soft X-ray Spectrometer instrument[2] on Astro-H[3] to cool a 6×6 array of x-ray microcalorimeters to 50 mK. The ADR is supported by a cryogenic system[4] consisting of a superfluid helium tank, a 4.5 K Joule-Thomson (JT) cryocooler, and additional 2-stage Stirling cryocoolers that pre-cool the JT cooler and cool radiation shields within the cryostat. The ADR is configured so that it can use either the liquid helium or the JT cryocooler as its heat sink, giving the instrument an unusual degree of tolerance for component failures or degradation in the cryogenic system. The flight detector assembly, ADR and dewar were integrated into the flight dewar in early 2014, and have since been extensively characterized and calibrated. This paper summarizes the operation and performance of the ADR in all of its operating modes.

Passive and active technologies have been used to control propellant boil-off, but the current state of understanding of cryogenic evaporation and condensation in microgravity is insufficient for designing large cryogenic depots critical to the long-term space exploration missions. One of the key factors limiting the ability to design such systems is the uncertainty in the accommodation coefficients (evaporation and condensation), which are inputs for kinetic modeling of phase change. A novel, combined experimental and computational approach is being used to determine the accommodation coefficients for liquid hydrogen and liquid methane. The experimental effort utilizes the Neutron Imaging Facility located at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland to image evaporation and condensation of hydrogenated propellants inside of metallic containers. The computational effort includes numerical solution of a model for phase change in the contact line and thin film regions as well as an CFD effort for determining the appropriate thermal boundary conditions for the numerical solution of the evaporating and condensing liquid. Using all three methods, there is the possibility of extracting the accommodation coefficients from the experimental observations. The experiments are the first known observation of a liquid hydrogen menisci condensing and evaporating inside aluminum and stainless steel cylinders. The experimental technique, complimentary computational thermal model and meniscus shape determination are reported. The computational thermal model has been shown to accurately track the transient thermal response of the test cells. The meniscus shape determination suggests the presence of a finite contact angle, albeit very small, between liquid hydrogen and aluminum oxide.

A new cryomacroscope prototype-a visualization device for the analysis of cryopreserved biological samples-is presented in the current study. In order to visualize samples larger than the field of view of the optical setup, a scanning mechanism is integrated into the system, which represents a key improvement over previous cryomacroscope prototypes. Another key feature of the new design is in its compatibility with available top-loading controlled-rate cooling chambers, which eliminates the need for a dedicated cooling mechanism. The objective for the current development is to create means to generate a single digital movie of an experimental investigation, with all relevant data overlaid. The visualization capabilities of the scanning cryomacroscope are demonstrated in the current study on the cryoprotective agent dimethyl sulfoxide and the cryoprotective cocktail DP6. Demonstrated effects include glass formation, various regimes of crystallization, thermal contraction, and fracture formation.

An experimental method is described for determining the low-temperature heat capacity (C(p)) of mg-sized powder samples using the Quantum Design "Physical Properties Measurement System" (PPMS). The powder is contained in an Al pan as an ∼1 mm thick compressed layer. The sample is not mixed with Apiezon N grease, as compared to other methods. Thus, it is not contaminated and can be used for further study. This is necessary for samples that are only available in tiny amounts. To demonstrate the method various samples, all insulating in nature, were studied including benzoic acid, sapphire and different silicate minerals. The measurements show that the method has an accuracy in C(p) to better than 1% at T above 30-50 K and ±3-5% up to ±10% below. The experimental procedure is based on three independent PPMS and three independent differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) measurements. The DSC C(p) data are used to slightly adjust the PPMS C(p) data by a factor CpDSC/CpPPMSat298K. This is done because heat capacities measured with a DSC device are more accurate around ambient T (⩽0.6%) than PPMS values and is possible because the deviation of PPMS heat capacities from reference values is nearly constant between about 50 K and 300 K. The resulting standard entropies agree with published reference values within 0.21% for the silicates, by 0.34% for corundum, and by 0.9% for powdered benzoic acid. The method thus allows entropy determinations on powders with an accuracy of better than 1%. The advantage of our method compared to other experimental techniques is that the sample powder is not contaminated with grease and that heat capacity values show less scatter at high temperatures.

We describe the design of a reusable Indium wire seal which has a small profile and is leak tight to better than 1x10(-10) std. cc/sec. from room temperature down to approximately mK. The pressure necessary to deform the Indium wire o-ring is provided by a screw-cap mating to threads on the outside of the cylindrical volume to be sealed.

This study investigates the effects of the thermal protocol on the development and relaxation of thermo-mechanical stress in cryopreservation by means of glass formation, also known as vitrification. The cryopreserved medium is modeled as a homogeneous viscoelastic domain, constrained within either a stiff cylindrical container or a highly compliant bag. Annealing effects during the cooling phase of the cryopreservation protocol are analyzed. Results demonstrate that an intermediate temperature-hold period can significantly reduce the maximum tensile stress, thereby decreasing the potential for structural damage. It is also demonstrated that annealing at temperatures close to glass transition significantly weakens the dependency of thermo-mechanical stress on the cooling rate. Furthermore, a slower initial rewarming rate after cryogenic storage may drastically reduce the maximum tensile stress in the material, which supports previous experimental observations on the likelihood of fracture at this stage. This study discusses the dependency of the various stress components on the storage temperature. Finally, it is demonstrated that the stiffness of the container wall can affect the location of maximum stress, with implications on the development of cryopreservation protocols.