Air Products to provide equipment for project studying universe’s origin

Allentown-based Air Products signed a contract with Fermi Research Alliance LLC, which manages and operates the U.S. DOE Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory known as Fermilab, to supply a custom nitrogen liquefier equipment package to support research of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, DUNE.

The DUNE experiment will take place more than a mile below the surface of the South Dakota Black Hills at the Sanford Underground Research Facility and at Fermilab’s research campus in Illinois. Fermilab is leading the participation of 35 countries in the DUNE project.

“Air Products is excited to bring our experience and advanced technology in the area of industrial gases to help DUNE with this important work,” Samir J. Serhan, Air Products’ chief operating officer, said in a release. “Air Products’ engineers have developed an innovative solution incorporating several parts of our business to create a nitrogen refrigeration system that will be transported deep underground and modularly assembled in the underground caverns of the SURF site.”

The vast caverns of DUNE will house large cryostats filled with liquid argon. Each the size of a five-story building, the cryostats will enable the detection of neutrinos coming from a proton accelerator beam generated about 800 miles away in Batavia, Illinois. The nitrogen liquefaction system, designed by Air Products, will be used to continually cool and recondense the argon that boils off from the neutrino detection system.

The customized nitrogen refrigeration equipment package includes technology from several Air Products business units including Rotoflow turbomachinery equipment, PRISM Membrane Solutions for nitrogen generation and Air Products’ Cold Box technology.

DUNE represents the largest international physics experiment in the study of neutrinos, which are tiny, subatomic particles. Physicists believe the neutrinos research at DUNE could help humanity understand the fundamentals of matter and the origins of the universe. The work includes over 1,000 scientists from more than 35 counties.

DUNE will be pursuing three major science goals: to find out whether neutrinos could be the reason the universe is made of matter; to look for subatomic phenomena that could help realize Einstein’s dream of the unification of forces; and to watch for neutrinos emerging from an exploding star, perhaps witnessing the birth of a neutron star or a black hole.

Paula Wolf is a freelance writer