He II heat exchanger test unit for the LHC inner triplet

The Inner Triplet Heat Exchanger Test Unit (IT-HXTU) is a 30-m long thermal model designed at Fermilab, built in US industry, fully automated and tested at CERN as part of the US LHC program to develop the LHC Interaction Region quadrupole system. The cooling scheme of the IT-HXTU is based on heat exchange between stagnant pressurized He II in the magnet cold mass and saturated He II (two-phase) flowing in a heat exchanger located outside of and parallel to the cold mass. The purposes of this test are, among others, to validate the proposed cooling scheme and to define an optimal control strategy to be implemented in the future LHC accelerator. This paper discusses the results for the heat exchanger test runs and emphasizes the thermal and hydraulic behavior of He II for the inner triplet cooling scheme.