Earticle

Thermoacoustic oscillations (TAOs) could be often observed in liquid helium cryogenic system especially in half-open tubes. These tubes have closed warm end (300K) and open cold end (usually 4.4K). This phenomenon significantly induces additional heat load to cryogenic system and other undesirable effects. This work focuses on using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method to study TAOs in liquid helium. The calculated physical model, numerical scheme and algorithm, and wall boundary conditions were introduced. The simulation results of onset process of thermoacoustic oscillations were presented and analyzed. In addition, other important characteristics including phase relation and frequency were studied. Moreover, comparisons between experiments and the CFD simulations were made, which demonstrated thevalidity of CFD simulation. CFD simulation can give us a better understanding of onset mechanism of TAOs and nonlinear characteristics in liquid helium cryogenic system.

Cryogenic vessels are special equipment that requires periodic evaluation of their thermal insulation performance. At the current standard, the test is considered as the loss product or heat leakage of cryogenic vessel, which takes over 72 h to evaluate; consequently, a large amount of working medium is discharged to the environment in the process. However, hydrogen is flammable and explosive, and the discharged gas may be dangerous. If liquid hydrogen is replaced with liquid nitrogen before testing, the operation then becomes complicated, and the loss product or heat leakage cannot respond to the thermal insulation performance of cryogenic vessels for liquid hydrogen. Therefore, a novel method is proposed to evaluate the heat leakage of cryogenic vessels for liquid hydrogen in self-pressurization. In contrast to the current testing methods, the method proposed in this study does not require discharge or exchange of working medium in all test processes. The proposed method is based on one-dimensional heat transfer analysis of cryogenic vessels, which is verified by experiment. When this method is used to predict the heat leakage, the comparison with the experimental data of the standard method shows that the maximum error of heat leakage is less than 5.0%.

The magnetic properties of heat treated O-series high temperature superconducting (HTS) GdBCO coated conductor (CC) tapes which were formed of Ag/GdBCO/Buffer-layers/Stainless Steel (SS), were investigated by employing a Quantum Design PPMS-14. Using a modified Bean model, the critical current density Jc values have been estimated from the mirr(H) data, which are obtained by measuring the magnetic moment m(H) loops. For a range of intermediate fields, which are interacting or collective flux pinning area, the magnetic flux behaviors were investigated from the relationship Jc  H-. In addition, the changes of irreversibility magnetic field Hirr line of heat-treated O-series HTS GdBCO CC tapes were analyzed, according as the annealing temperature under oxygen flowing increases. Both weak and strong break-downs were found by examining the changes of irreversibility magnetic field Hirr lines.