Design and optimization of a cold compressor impeller in a large superfluid helium cryogenic system

Abstract

As the scale of superconducting accelerator construction grows, superfluid-helium systems providing the cryogenic environment for them are increasingly widely used. Most of the large-scale superfluid-helium system in international accelerator laboratories use the cold compressor as a pressure generating device. The impeller is the critical component of the cold compressor. Cfturbo® is adopted here to design the impeller and its 3D model is shown. CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) is used for simulation of the performance of the designed impeller. This paper analyses the simulation results and the distribution of the flow field, and explores how impeller performance varies as structure parameters change, thus optimizing the impeller. Simulation results of the optimized impeller indicate good performance, which should enable it to meet its design requirements.