Leak-Tightness Assessment of Demountable Joints for the Super Fluid Helium System of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

Abstract

The future high energy accelerator LHC presently considered at CERN, will make heavy use of demountable cryogenic joints operating at superfluid helium temperatures (1.8 K). These joints will be required for connecting the cryomagnets to their feeding lines, helium safety valves to cold masses, both on their measuring benches and eventually in their final installation set-up. The very large size of the future machine and, consequently, the large number of cryogenic joints imply that their reliability in leak tightness be very high, in particular after extreme loading conditions such as the high helium pressures resulting from superconducting magnet quenches.