Thermal Performance of Insulating Cryogenic Pin Spacers

Following the proposal to introduce an actively cooled radiation screen (5-10 K) for the LHC machine, the design of the LHC cryostat foresees the need for spacers between the cold mass and the radiati on screen. The thermal impedance of the chosen material should be very high and the shape selected to withstrand the contact stress due to the displacements induced by the coll-down and warm-up transi ent. A cryogenic experiment dedicated to studying the thermal behaviour of several proposed spacers was performed at the cryogenics laboratory of CERN before choosing the one to be used for further i nvestigation on the LHC full-scale Cryostat Thermal Model [1] [2]. This paper describes a quantitative analysis leading to the choice of the spacer.