NMR Oxford Superconducting magnet QUENCH at Reading University

Follow me: www.scottbouch.posterous.com or www.twitter.com/scottbouch

400MHz Oxford superconducting magnet Quenched by opening the vacuum valve to a little helium gas. It filled the ceiling with helium gas boil off from probably about 40 Litres of liquid helium. This magnet had reached the end od it's economic life, and was being replaced by a newer model. Quenching a magnet is not only exciting and fun, but also the fastest way to warm it up ready for dismantling.

I was a Bruker engineer at the time.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• NMR
• explode
• explosion
• Bruker
• Oxford
• superconducting
• supercon
• superconductivity
• quench
• magnet
• reading
• university
• helium
• vacuum
• spectrometer
• woosh
• college
• graduation
• student
• students
• education
• books
• technology
• scottbouch
• scott.bouch
• nitrogen
• gas
• liquid
• cryogen
• cryogenics
• school
• energy
• power

[vibrio]

our ultrashield avance 600mhz quenched twice during my PhD lol

[sbscottmonkey]

@vibrio

Bet you loved that!! There's a LOT of helium in a 600!

[ash18746]

i'll make sure not to apply to grad schoolhere , cuz you guys looks like a bunch of idiots. machine costs over a 100k you really wanna be messing around with that?

[sbscottmonkey]

@ash18746

Hi Ash, thanks for the "nice" "positive" words...

This magnet was actually being replaced by a brand new Bruker "Ultrashield" magnet. This old one was made by Oxford Instruments some 20 years ago, and was scrapped. Quenching a magnet is the fastest way of "warming it up" to room temperature so we could dismantle it to be scrapped.

I was one of the 'only two' superconducting magnet specialist field service engineers in the UK at the time, so we really did know what we were doing.....

[sbscottmonkey]

Cool - this has made it into your lecture notes!!?? Which University are you at? Cheers, Scott.

[sbscottmonkey]

Somewhere in the region of £6 or £7 per Litre!

[armondikov]

@vibrio Funny that, because the only magnet that's quenched in my department that I've heard of is a 600 ultrashield...

[vibrio]

@sbscottmonkey

they were at night so never saw them - just the big dent in the ceiling tils from where the port cover flew off lol

[xjet]

The problem is that helium is an increasingly scarce resource -- in fact the USA has already expressed concern over the limited amount of the stuff that remains on earth. Unless we come up with some large-scale fusion reactors that create the stuff as a byproduct then we're going to be stuff once the current stocks are gone.

[gideonfarrell]

@surfcello the joys of NST1A?

[surfcello]

@hai2410 Perhaps to illustrate how much energy can be stored in an inductor? At least, I think that's why it's in my lecture notes.

[scrillyto]

This is Epic! Anybody got a video of an accidental quench?? hahha