At the start, 1.85K operation seemed reasonable and an all-helium four solution the only one possible. It is still evident that for 1.85K operation, an allhelium four cycle is optimum, not because of lowest capital cost, but due to less pumping power. In a hybrid helium three-helium four refrigerator, the specific power for pumping helium-three is 4.0026 I 3.016 times that of pumping helium four.

Membrane gas separation has potential for the recovery and purification of helium, because the majority of membranes have selectivity for helium. This review reports on the current state of the research and patent literature for membranes undertaking helium separation. This includes direct recovery from natural gas, as an ancillary stage in natural gas processing, as well as niche applications ...

Helium has always been a bit of an outsider on the Periodic Table. Its two isotopes, helium-3 and helium-4, remain liquid down to absolute zero and have the lowest liquefaction temperature among the gases. These features can be traced to the high zero-point energy relative to their attractive potential. In two dimensions, helium4 will form a liquid and become superfluid at temperatures that dep...

In underwater diving, decompression schedules are based on compartmental models of nitrogen and helium tissue kinetics. However, these models are not based on direct measurements of nitrogen and helium kinetics. In isoflurane-anesthetized sheep, nitrogen and helium kinetics in the hind limb (n = 5) and brain (n = 5) were determined during helium-oxygen breathing and after return to nitrogen-oxy...

For the purpose of deriving the helium abundances in chemically peculiar stars, the importance of assuming a correct helium abundance has been investigated for determining the effective temperature and gravity of main sequence B-type stars, making full use of the present capability of reproducing their helium lines. Even if the flux distribution of main sequence B-type stars appears to depend o...

Helium was first solidified at the famous Kamerlingh Onnes low-temperature physics laboratories in Leiden by W. H. Keesom [1] on June 25, 1926. The initial experiments by Sir Francis Simon at Oxford University and by Keesom and their collaborators focused on the melting curve, the specific heat, and the thermal conductivity of solid helium as a test of our early understanding of solids. These m...

We use the two-zone model of Cooper & Narayan to study the onset and time evolution of hydrogen-triggered type I X-ray bursts on accreting neutron stars. At the lowest accretion rates, thermally unstable hydrogen burning ignites helium as well and produces a mixed hydrogen and helium burst. For somewhat higher accretion rates, thermally unstable hydrogen burning does not ignite helium and thus ...

Density functional theory calculations have been used to study the incorporation of helium in perfect and defect-containing palladium tritides, where we have calculated the energetics of incorporation and the migration behaviour. Helium atoms preferably occupy the octahedral interstitial and substitutional sites in the perfect and Pd vacancy-containing tritides, respectively. The energetics rev...

A theoretical model has been developed to describe the probability of charge transfer from helium cations to dopant molecules inside helium nanodroplets following electron impact ionization. The location of the initial charge site inside helium nanodroplets subject to electron impact has been investigated and is found to play an important role in understanding the ionization of dopants inside h...

Emission spectra of constituent gas species from glow discharge plasmas using argon-helium, krypton-helium, argon-krypton, and krypton-argon gas mixtures were analyzed to elucidate collisional energy transfer between these gas species occurring in the plasma. In the argon-helium mixed gas plasma, the enhancement or quenching of particular Ar II lines was observed when helium was added to an arg...