We have developed a compact cryogenic system with a pulse tube refrigerator and a coaxial heat exchanger. This liquefaction-purification system not only saves the cooling power used to reach high gaseous recirculation rate, but also reduces the impurity level with high speed. The heat exchanger operates with an efficiency of 99%, which indicates the possibility for fast xenon gas recirculation in a highpressurized large-scale xenon storage with much less thermal losses.
Liquid-xenon based particle detectors have been dramatically growing in size during the last years, and are now exceeding the one-ton scale. The required high xenon purity is usually achieved by continuous recirculation of xenon gas through a high-temperature getter. This challenges the traditional way of cooling these large detectors, since in a thermally well insulated detector, most of the cooling power is spent to compensate losses from recirculation. The phase change during recondensing requires five times more cooling power than cooling the gas from ambient temperature to -100C (173 K). Thus, to reduce the cooling power requirements for large detectors, we propose to use the heat from the purified incoming gas to evaporate the outgoing xenon gas, by means of a heat exchanger. Generally, a heat exchanger would appear to be only of very limited use, since evaporation and liquefaction occur at zero temperature difference. However, the use of a recirculation pump reduces the pressure of the extracted liquid, forces it to evaporate, and thus cools it down. We show that this temperature difference can be used for an efficient heat exchange process. We investigate the use of a commercial parallel plate heat exchanger with a small liquid xenon detector. Although we expected to be limited by the available cooling power to flow rates of about 2 SLPM, rates in excess of 12 SLPM can easily be sustained, limited only by the pump speed and the impedance of the flow loop. The heat exchanger operates with an efficiency of (96.8 +/- 0.5)%. This opens the possibility for fast xenon gas recirculation in large-scale experiments, while minimizing thermal losses.
The Hamamatsu R11410 photomultiplier, a tube of 3 diameter and with a very low intrinsic radioactivity, is an interesting light sensor candidate for future experiments using liquid xenon (LXe) as target for direct dark matter searches. We have performed several experiments with the R11410 with the goal of testing its performance in environments similar to a dark matter detector setup. In particular, we examined its long-term behavior and stability in LXe and its response in various electric field configurations.
Detection of low-intensity light relies on the conversion of photons to photoelectrons, which are then multiplied and detected as an electrical signal. To measure the actual intensity of the light, one must know the factor by which the photoelectrons have been multiplied. To obtain this amplification factor, we have developed a procedure for estimating precisely the signal caused by a single photoelectron. The method utilizes the fact that the photoelectrons conform to a Poisson distribution. The average signal produced by a single photoelectron can then be estimated from the number of noise events, without requiring analysis of the distribution of the signal produced by a single photoelectron. The signal produced by one or more photoelectrons can be estimated experimentally without any assumptions. This technique, and an example of the analysis of a signal from a photomultiplier tube, are described in this study.
This study investigates one of the possible approaches of improvement of heat exchangers efficiency. Literature review shows that most approaches of improvement are based on the heat transfer surface increasing and laminar-to-turbulent flow transition using different types of riffles forming and shaped inserts. In this article, a novel approach to the heat transfer intensification was employed. The main hypothesis is that applying of multi-chamber design of heat exchanger - ordinary shell-and-tube regions intersperse with common for all tubes regions - will help to improve the utilization of the entrance hydraulic and thermal regions thereby receive higher heat transfer coefficients and higher heat capacity of the heat exchange device. To prove the hypotheses we take the following steps. Firstly, development of the new geometry of the heat-exchanger design - multi chambers construction. Secondly, proving of the higher efficiency of novel design comparing to ordinary design by analytical calculations. Thirdly, numerical simulation of the heat exchange process and fluids flow in both types of heat exchangers that proves the analytical solution.
We have developed a prototype of the photomultiplier tube (PMT) readout system for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) Large Size Telescope (LST). Two thousand PMTs along with their readout systems are arranged on the focal plane of each telescope, with one readout system per 7-PMT cluster. The Cherenkov light pulses generated by the air showers are detected by the PMTs and amplified in a compact, low noise and wide dynamic range gain block. The output of this block is then digitized at a sampling rate of the order of GHz using the Domino Ring Sampler DRS4, an analog memory ASIC developed at Paul Scherrer Institute. The sampler has 1,024 capacitors per channel and four channels are cascaded for increased depth. After a trigger is generated in the system, the charges stored in the capacitors are digitized by an external slow sampling ADC and then transmitted via Gigabit Ethernet. An onboard FPGA controls the DRS4, trigger threshold, and Ethernet transfer. In addition, the control and monitoring of the Cockcroft-Walton circuit that provides high voltage for the 7-PMT cluster are performed by the same FPGA. A prototype named Dragon has been developed that has successfully sampled PMT signals at a rate of 2 GHz, and generated single photoelectron spectra.
Wan-Ting Chen
,D. Chbib
,J.-P. Cussonneau
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(2012)
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"Improvement of xenon purification system using a combination of a pulse tube refrigerator and a coaxial heat exchanger"
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Wan-Ting Chen
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