Commissioning of helium compression system for the 12 GeV refrigerator

The compressor system used for the Jefferson Lab (JLab) 12 GeV upgrade, also known as the CHL-2 compressor system, incorporates many design changes to the typical compressor skid design to improve the efficiency, reliability and maintainability from previous systems. These include a considerably smaller bulk oil separator design that does not use coalescing elements/media, automated control of cooling oil injection based on the helium discharge temperature, a helium after-cooler design that is designed for and promotes coalescing of residual oil and a variable speed bearing oil pump to reduce oil bypass. The CHL-2 helium compression system has five compressors configured with four pressure levels that supports the three pressure levels in the cold box. This paper will briefly review several of these improvements and discuss some of the recent commissioning results.