Abstract
A procedure for fabricating, forming, and bonding thin tiles of CryoCoat™ UL79 cryogenic insulation, a syntactic foam material, to a large curved surface was developed and its performance was verified. This effort was undertaken because of safety concerns for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 02 (AMS‐02) experiment, a space‐based particle physics detector designed to search for antimatter, dark matter and the origin of cosmic rays in space. The key component of the detector is a large superconducting magnet, cooled to 1.8 K by superfluid helium. From ground safety and flight safety considerations, the system must be safe in the event of a sudden catastrophic loss of insulating vacuum. Previous testing showed that a thin layer of CryoCoat™ UL79 reduces the heat flux in the event of vacuum loss by nearly a factor of eight, which satisfies the safety concern. A practical method of applying a uniform 3 mm layer of CryoCoat™ UL79 insulation material to the helium vessel containing the superconducting magnet was developed for this requirement. The fabrication procedure was validated through application of CryoCoat™ UL79 on a prototype helium tank, which was subsequently tested at cryogenic temperatures. Because of these successful tests, NASA has accepted the conformable tile method for applying CryoCoat™ UL79 and has agreed that AMS‐02 is safe to fly.
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