Cooling Circuit Design for the Large-scale Liquid Argon Detectors in the ICARUS Experiment

A collaboration between the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFL) and CERN is currently working on the ICARUS neutrino experiment. The large-scale ICARUS T600 detector is designed to be filled with liquid argon and to detect neutrinos allowing research in the field of neutrino os- cillations [2]. The Cryolab at CERN was assigned the task to investigate the details of the thermal shield design for the ICARUS T600 detector taking into account the constraints given by the experiment. The thermal shield is actively cooled with boiling nitrogen and operates at a pressure of 2.8 bar, which corresponds to a saturation temperature of 87 K. The thermal shield should have a temperature gradient less than 500 mK. Theoretically, not considering the pressure drop along the cooling circuit, the temperature stays constant during evaporation in the chosen two-phase flow regime. The only temperature change is caused by the small pressure drop along the cooling loop. Due to the strict temperature constraints, it is important to study the pressure drop of nitrogen two-phase flow along the cooling circuit of the thermal shield in different orientations of the flow in respect to gravity. The objective of this master thesis is to investigate the proposed design of the thermal shield of the ICARUS detector especially the pressure drop along the nitrogen two-phase flow cooling circuit.