Radiative and conductive heat transfer in a 4-K helium phase separator with minimum heat loss

Abstract Improvements in simulation and practice for the heat load of a helium phase separator are discussed. The separator cryostat (volume 100 L, cooling capacity 1.5 W at 4.2 K) re-condenses and stores liquid helium. An additional radiation shield was designed to minimize the radiative heat transfer and to decrease the heat conduction. The experimental results indicate that the heat load of the separator was decreased from 5.56 W to 1.555 W, a gain about 4 W of heat load, which is an improvement by 72%. Liquid helium (50 L) was stored in the separator stably for more than 90 h. Software implementing the finite-element method (FEM) was used to predict the temperature distribution of pipe fittings and the separator heat load with or without the additional radiation shield. The results of these simulations show that the temperatures of the pipe fittings were significantly decreased in the separator with additional radiation shields. For the heat load, the trends of simulation and experimental results were similar. This work provides a simple and effective method to minimize the radiation heat load of a separator. In this paper, we discuss in detail the improvements of the model, the experimental setup and the results of comparisons between experiments and simulations.