1204.6061 (Henning O. Back et al.)

First Commissioning of a Cryogenic Distillation Column for Low Radioactivity Underground Argon    [PDF]

Henning O. Back, Thomas Alexander, Andrew Alton, Christopher Condon, Ernst de Haas, Cristiano Galbiati, Augusto Goretti, Tristan Hohmann, Andrea Ianni, Cary Kendziora, Ben Loer, David Montanari, Pablo Mosteiro, Stephen Pordes

We report on the performance and commissioning of a cryogenic distillation column for low radioactivity underground argon at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The distillation column is designed to accept a mixture of argon, helium, and nitrogen and return pure argon with a nitrogen contamination less than 10 ppm. In the first commissioning, we were able to run the distillation column in a continuous mode and produce argon that is 99.9% pure. After running in a batch mode, the argon purity was increased to 99.95%, with 500 ppm of nitrogen remaining. The efficiency of collecting the argon from the gas mixture was between 70% and 81%, at an argon production rate of 0.84-0.98 kg/day.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6061