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X-ray Spectrometer Detector System
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GLC is a Materials Science Engineer, Ceramics Expert, Materials Processing Consultant, Research Manager with world-class expertise in materials processing, extrusion, injection molding, dry-pressing (biaxial/isostatic), tape-casting, screen and mask printing, roll compaction, conventional powder processing techniques, physical/chemical deposition techniques.
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X-ray spectrometry is the primary tool for studying the emissions of a variety of unique interstellar objects such as white dwarfs, black holes, and neutron stars. Such studies can only be conducted outside the atmosphere using a satellite-based detector system. The X-ray Spectrometer Detector System is housed in a helium cryostat that consists of a tank of pumped liquid helium at 1.3 Kelvin inside a 17 Kelvin support structure. The tank of liquid helium acts as a heat sink for the adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator that cools a superconducting magnet. The useful life of the detector system in space is solely determined by the supply of liquid helium in the cryostat. The primary loss mechanism for the liquid helium is evaporation due to heat conducted to the cryostat through the wiring required to provide electrical power to the magnet and two cryogenic valves associated with the helium tank.
Initial designs for the cryostat wiring harness used conventional copper wire and an iterative thermal model was used to optimize the ratio of the wires' cross-sectional areas to lengths to minimize heat conduction along the harness. However, this optimized design was shown to impose a 2.7 milliwatt heat load on the cryostat. A heat load of this magnitude would give the detector system a useful life in space of 9 months, significantly less than the 2.5 year mission lifetime goal. Meeting the mission life goal required that the heat load on the cryostat be reduced by more than a factor of three to 0.8 milliwatts. The evaluation of alternate metal conductors indicated that little improvement in the 2.7 milliwatt figure could be expected as metals with lower thermal conductivity, stainless steel or manganin, for example, had increased electrical resistivity that resulted in an increased Joule heating in the cryostat.
Given the issues with conventional conductors, the decision was made to utilize high temperature superconducting (HTS) materials for the downleads into the cryostat for the wiring harness. Yttrium barium cuprate (YBa2Cu3O7-x) filaments, 0.25mm in diameter and composed of sintered, polycrystalline material, were available in lengths of 25 cm. The operating temperature range of the downlead (1.3 to 17K) was well below the critical temperature of the HTS material (90K). Consequently, during operation, the HTS downleads would impose no resistive heat load on the cryostat and, given the relatively low intrinsic thermal conductivity of the ceramic superconductor, conductive losses were expected to me much lower than conventional metals.
The very fragile ceramic filaments were made launch-qualified by attaching them to the outside of a thin-walled fiberglass/epoxy tube with a custom epoxy blended with 20% alumina filler to match the thermal expansion of the filaments. The finished HTS wiring harnesses (two were used for redundancy) had a total heat load of 0.37 milliwatts, significantly under what was required to meet the mission lifetime goal.
[X-ray detector front-end photo courtesy of NASA]
| Materials Science Engineer, Ceramics Expert, Materials Processing Consultant, Research Manager, materials processing, extrusion, injection molding, dry-pressing (biaxial/isostatic), tape-casting, screen and mask printing, roll compaction, conventional powder processing techniques, physical/chemical deposition techniques. | |
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