Comparison of floating and thermalized multilayer insulation systems at low boundary temperature

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is 26.7 km circumference particle collider using high-field superconducting magnets operating in superfluid helium. An efficient and robust thermal insulation system is therefore required to minimize the residual heat in leak to the large surface area at 1.9 K constituted by the stainless steel wall of the helium enclosure. The baseline solution uses "floating" multilayer reflective insulation. Moreover, an alternative consists of a combination of multilayer reflective films and a soft screen, partially thermalized to the 5 K level and supported away from the cold wall by net-type insulating spacers. This chapter establishes the improvement potential of the alternative over the baseline solution, and compares their insulation performance on the basis of measured characteristics of thermal contacts and spacers.