Low-temperature research at ILK Dresden

By lowering the vapor pressure, the boiling point of He-4 can be reduced from 4.2 K (-268.95 °C) at ambient pressure to below 1.2 K (-271.95 °C), and for He-3 even to below 0.5 K (-272.65 °C).

A particularly interesting point for He-4, which is also relevant in special experimental setups at ILK Dresden in the main area of cryogenics and low-temperature physics, is the so-called lambda point at 2.17 K (-270.98 °C) and ambient pressure. At lower temperatures, He-4 becomes superfluid, loses its viscosity, and can creep upward on sufficiently cold surfaces.

Helium is a very valuable noble gas with numerous applications in a wide variety of industrial and research fields. Liquid helium, for example, is indispensable as a refrigerant in low-temperature systems such as magnetic resonance imaging.

Among other things, the ILK Dresden is conducting research in its helium laboratory into innovative solutions for extracting helium from natural gas.

On Earth, the most important natural helium deposits are found in the atmosphere and in natural gas. Due to its low concentration in air – only approx. 0.0005 % – helium is primarily extracted from natural gas.

In recent years, however, an extreme helium shortage has emerged worldwide, resulting in acute supply bottlenecks in some cases and a sharp rise in prices. Against this backdrop, new approaches and innovative processes for helium separation from natural gas have been investigated at ILK Dresden. In particular, these should later be suitable for efficiently extracting high-purity helium even from natural gas with very low helium concentrations.