Thermal Management Design and Key Technology Validation for PandaX Underground Experiment

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel auto-cascade refrigerator with ethanol coolant that provides reliable, high-power cooling for large-scale liquid xenon experiments, addressing limitations of traditional cooling methods.

Contribution

Development of an auto-cascade refrigerator with ethanol coolant and heat transfer improvements for large-scale liquid xenon detector cooling.

Findings

Achieved 2.5 kW cooling power at 155 K.

Demonstrated feasibility of a 5 kW cooling system at 160 K.

Simplified auxiliary devices for liquid xenon experiments.

Abstract

The scale of liquid xenon experiments for rare events searching is expanding, which is planned even to fifty tons level. The detector and distillation tower require a reliable cooling source with large cooling power at liquid xenon temperature range. Pulse tube refrigerators and GM refrigerators, which were widely used in previous detectors, have the disadvantages of small cooling power, large space occupation, and non-standby mutuality, which become bottlenecks of the experiment scale expansion. In this study, an auto-cascade refrigerator with ethanol coolant is developed, and the heat transfer effect is improved by adopting the concentric shaft heat exchanger and after-pumping heat transfer scheme. The 2.5 kW stable cooling power is obtained at 155 K. Further, the feasibility and key technology of the centralized cooling system of 5 kw at 160 K is discussed. The study can simplify liquid xenon experimental auxiliary devices, which will be helpful for the PandaX-xT experiment scheme and its laboratory infrastructure design.