Liquid Helium Pumps

barber-nichols.com

40 points·HarryHirsch··11 comments

The story of the hunt for liquid helium is one of the more fascinating and colorful stores I've read. The blog Damn Interesting weaves the story pretty well.

https://www.damninteresting.com/absolute-zero-is-0k/

Superbly written and very educational. Thank you for the link!

That was a fantastic story, thanks for posting it

Thanks for the link!

Not sure what prompted the post, but this reminded me of one cool use of liquid helium: as a scintillator for particle experiments. Huh, I was going to comment that SNO+ was planning on using a mix of liquid helium and argon for its scintillator, but after checking the site it looks like they've switched to linearl alkyl benzene (http://snoplus.phy.queensu.ca/About.html). Guess things have changed since 2012!

Regarding what prompted the post, its probably not coincidence that the subject of liquid helium pumps came up in a Worldbuilding Stack Exchange question earlier today: http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70788/how-c... .

This company also made the turbopumps for SpaceX' Merlin engine [1].

[1] http://www.barber-nichols.com/products/rocket-engine-turbopu...

Would have been more interesting if we were looking at a liquid helium fluidyne engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidyne_engine

I wonder if they ever tried mounting one of those on top of CPU.

Is this theoretically possible? Wouldn't the 'working gas' liquify since you're pumping LHe?

There is a nice documentary about the search for Liquid Helium. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzYdo1xEbQo

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