News from the British Cryogenic Cluster:
Wishing You a Very Happy New Year !

January 2017

Dear <<First Name>>,

We hope you had a Great Christmas, survived Hogmanay and are back revved up ready to out-do The Donald, Making Cryogenics even Greater (again !)

In the spirit of making 2017 better, we have two corrections from December : Pablo Esquinazi identified room temperature superconductivity in graphite, not graphene (thanks David Cooke). And apologies to Richard Clarke for a dodgy link to the well considered paper by IFP in Paris (on Helium) to which he alerted us. New Year Resolution : We’ll try harder !

Good Luck for 2017 and Happy Reading from Team BCryo

Cluster Member News

HIghview Power Storage Highview’s scaled up 5MW energy storage demonstrator plant near Manchester exploits lowgrade waste heat from an adjacent electricity generator powered by landfill gas to improve efficiency. gasworld spoke to Matt Barnett. Highview’s latest newsletter makes reference to working with EPRI and their American partner GE.

Cryogenics in Electric Power & Energy Storage

The US DoE Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy is funding 13 projects with $25m, much of which is going towards improvement of superconducting wires and coils for rotating electric machines.

The Cold Chain & Insulation

Cryohub CryoHub (Cryogenic Energy Storage for Renewable Refrigeration and Power Supply) took its project team on a visit to the Frigolix cold store in Belgium.

BCC Sponsor, the IoR, has this portal for Papers, eg on the History of Food Freezing Engineering and Future Refrigerant Choices; and Talks, eg on Sure Chill refrigeration technology.

Thermal News highlighted this report on the Aerogel Market. Two interesting stats : the current market size is $260m pa; Financial loss at Aspen Aerogels over the past ten years – $280m.

Cryogenic Travels

More on Ronald Dekker and his son Maurice travelling to India by bicycle …

Hydrogen, Helium, & Xenon

New Discoveries of Helium made it to #4 in this review of 12 key science moments in 2016.

News in LNG & LEG

Exxon Mobil’s 2017 Outlook for Energy projects global LNG trade to grow 2.5 times by 2040. Central and European Gas infrastructure developments connecting Russian pipe gas and Global LNG are described here. You can download the latest Nexant Briefing Note on Gas and LNG here. (They predict an average Brent oil price of $55 a barrel in 2017.) And not directly Cryogenic, but maybe of interest, the World Bank, reporting on gas flaring says it’s going up (the FT equates flared gas with the annual consumption of UK, Germany and Switzerland combined.)

News in Science & Healthcare

Cryogenics as a Force for Good : gasworld reports on a mobile oxygen trailer from Chart Industries, providing emergency backup to hospitals and mass casualty situations.

NASA

NASA’s Cryogenic Test Lab at Kennedy Space Centre has been helping Technip in France with aerogel technology for design of the massive Prelude Floating LNG vessel for Shell, and working on insulation standards and cryogenic tanks for automotive applications. NASA technologists have also developed a superconducting Transition Edge Sensor.

GE has launched its 'Freelium' technology, cutting the amount of helium in an MRI scanner by 99%. Aspect Imaging launched its largest bore, permanent MR requiring no helium for cooling.

A team at HZB in Berlin set a new low temperature record for use in cryogenic x-ray spectroscopy. Nature presents work on adhesives – good for -196°C – developed at Case Western University. Science published evidence of bulk superconductivity in pure bismuth at ambient pressure. Scientists are taking cold atom interferometers off the ground in search of more precision. And the world's smallest magnifying glass is the description of this work led by (Cluster Member) Cambridge University, involving single atoms in a gold nanostructure cooled to -260°C.

‘Phononic Lamb Shift’ (a variation on the original Lamb Shift first measured in 1947 and defying classical understanding of empty space) measured in Heidelberg, using Bose Einstein Condensates.

Fabricating ITER’s 1000 tonne central solenoid magnet at General Atomics in California requires 116km of kapton/fibreglass tape (300km needed in production) and 2000 litres of impregnating resin … And here is ITER Progress in 60 pretty neat pictures.

Safety

CERN recently hosted a Cryogenic Safety Seminar. Kryolize is a new software tool developed by CERN for sizing pressure-relief devices.

Product News

LakeShore Cryotronics new 8600 Series Vibrating Sample Magnetometer operates from 4 to 1273K.

Cryo Biz

Toby Peters announced on LinkedIn he is stepping down as Dearman Engine CEO.

No wonder Tokamak Energy CEO David Kingham looks happy – they’ve just had £10m investment from Legal & General and private investor David Hardin.

Who better than John Raquet to write in his own gasworld magazine about the reconvened Praxair-Linde ‘merger’ discussions … (with the delightful reminder that Praxair once was Linde in America.) Phil Kornbluth posted an ‘expectation that helium will be an area of significant regulatory scrutiny; Linde and Praxair are in the Big 4 in Global Helium with a combined market share greater than 40%.

Canon has bought Toshiba Medical for $6bn, in a dodgy-sounding deal, helping offset over $1bn damage for an accounting scandal at Toshiba.

Brooks Automation acquired Cool Lab – sample cooling, freezing, transport and storage specialist from BioCision.

Russia’s Rosneft, looking to step up its LNG presence vs arch rival Gazprom, has bought a stake in the Mediterranean Zohr project, not long after selling 20% of itself to leading LNG producer Qatar …

Events & Education

The CERN High Luminosity (HiLumi) upgrade programme takes place over the next decade. CERN is organising industry events to promote HiLumi, one jointly with STFC at Daresbury Laboratory on May 22-23 (originally planned for March 30).

After MT-25 (August 27-September 1, and just after the European Cryogenics Days and Workshop on HTS Cooling at Karlsruhe (September 13-15) Cluster Day (September 20 at Daresbury Lab) will overlap with EUCAS in Geneva (September 17-21).

Subscribe here for updates on ICEC27-ICMC 2018 taking place in Oxford from September 3-7 2018.

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British Cryogenics Cluster · Rutherford Appleton Laboratory · Harwell · Didcot, Oxfordshire OX11 0QX · United Kingdom