Sub-cooled liquid nitrogen cryogenic system with neon turbo-refrigerator for HTS power equipment

Abstract

We developed a prototype sub-cooled liquid nitrogen (LN) circulation system for HTS power equipment. The system consists of a neon turbo-Brayton refrigerator with a LN sub-cooler and LN circulation pump unit. The neon refrigerator has more than 2 kW cooling power at 65 K. The LN sub-cooler is a plate-fin type heat exchanger and is installed in a refrigerator cold box. In order to carry out the system performance tests, a dummy cryostat having an electric heater was set instead of a HTS power equipment. Sub-cooled LN is delivered into the sub-cooler by the LN circulation pump and cooled within it. After the sub-cooler, sub-cooled LN goes out from the cold box to the dummy cryostat, and comes back to the pump unit. The system can control an outlet sub-cooled LN temperature by adjusting refrigerator cooling power. The refrigerator cooling power is automatically controlled by the turbo-compressor rotational speed. In the performance tests, we increased an electric heater power from 200 W to 1300 W abruptly. We confirmed the temperature fluctuation was about ±1 K. We show the cryogenic system details and performance test results in this paper.