A Helium Recovery Condenser for a Low-Temperature Laboratory: Liquefaction Rate, Cold-Head Load and Recovery Fraction

This paper presents a computed design for a helium recovery condenser intended for cryogen recovery systems, with its performance, resource budgets and margins derived from stated assumptions rather than asserted. The headline results are: liquefaction rate set by the limiting stage of 20.3 litres per day; total heat to be removed per litre of liquid produced, all stages of 51.8 kJ per litre; fraction of the laboratory boil-off returned as liquid of 0.813 dimensionless; liquid recovered per day against the stated boil-off of 20.3 litres per day; electrical energy per litre recovered at full rate of 8.85 kWh per litre. Each figure was produced by the deposited computation from the inputs listed in the Methods, and the sensitivity of the conclusions to those inputs is examined in the Discussion. The design is a paper study: it is labelled, on its face and in this abstract, SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED, and no quantity reported here is a measurement of built hardware.