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Evaporative CO2 cooling for thermal control of scientific equipments

Abstract: Scientific equipment in general is often demanding more sophisticated thermal control solutions as power densities are increasing and available space for cooling hardware is getting smaller. This trend needs new cooling methods which are able to remove large heat quantities in confined spaces. A promising technology is evaporative cooling with carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 evaporates at a much higher pressure than normal refrigerants which results in low created vapor volumes and hence small cooling hardware. Other properties of CO2 are also beneficial such as low viscosity, high latent heat and outstanding heat transfer capabilities. All together CO2 is a perfect fluid for small volume or low mass cooling systems. It is applied successfully on the particle physics detector AMS on the international Space Station and LHCb-Velo in the LHC accelerator at CERN. In particle physics this technology is now considered to be the prime candidate technology for most future silicon detectors. This talk will show the benefits of CO2 cooling and as well as an overview and test results of the existing and future systems.
Speaker: Bart Verlaat - NIKHEF and CERN
Speaker Bio:
Poster Link: Poster
Presentation: Presentation on 3/28/2012 (PDF)