Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

A Design Utility for Planning Liquid Helium Recoilers in the JLEIC Ion Collider Ring

Student: Simon Davenport

School: College of William and Mary

Mentored By: Tim Michalski and Brain Mastracci

The Jefferson Lab Electron-Ion Collider (JLEIC) is a proposed addition to Jefferson Lab that would allow for greater capabilities in studying quantum chromodynamics. A part of this proposed expansion, the Ion Collider Ring (ICR), would make use of superconducting magnets to steer ions at requisite energies. Liquid helium at 4.5 Kelvin cools these magnets, but the liquid helium needs a supplementary system to maintain this temperature. One proposed solution is to install recoolers, a type of heat exchanger, in order to keep the helium at a suitably low temperature. The objective of this project is to create a tool to help determine the viability of recoolers as a proposed solution for magnet cooling and provide an initial design. The tool created for this task is a flexible spreadsheet-based design utility. The utility makes calculations of helium thermodynamic properties in an item by item audit of heat transfer, thus allowing for the simulation of different recooler arrangements. The design utility is also able to give a rough estimate of the size of potential designs, which the user can filter by providing design limitations. Much of the actual use of this design utility will be contingent on decisions made after its creation. However, a cursory inquiry indicates that a design for the ICR with recoolers may be viable with as few as 16 units.