Contractible Beat Pipe for Conduction Cooled Superconducting Magnets

A contractible heat pipe is designed and tested to improve cooling performance of conduction cooled superconducting magnet. When the heat pipe temperature drops below the triple point temperature, heat pipe working fluid freezes to create low pressure. From this moment the heat pipe does net work any more (OFF state) and it just works as a heat leak path when the temperature of the first stage is higher than that of the second stage. Considering small cooling capacity of the second stage around 4.2 K, the conduction loss is not negligible. Therefore, the contractible heat pipe, made of a metal bellows and copper tubes, was considered to eliminate the conduction loss. Nitrogen and argon are as working fluid of heat pipe. The copper block is cooled down with these heat pipe and the cooling performance for each heat pipe is compared. At off state, the bellows is contracted due to the low pressure of heat pipe and the evaporator section of the heat pipe is detached about 3 mm from the second stage cold head of the cryocooler. In this way, we tan eliminate the conduction loss through the heat pipe wall.