Helium Recovery dealers, required in experiments for advanced physics where very low temperatures are needed, is a precious commodity. Although it is a byproduct of natural gas well operations, and it is therefore becoming more and more expensive. The price has doubled over the last decade, according to some estimates.
But some labs, seeing the trend and noting how thousands of dollars of the precious gas can quickly deplete a department’s budget, have instituted ways to conserve and recycle the gas with advanced systems. One of the latest is the University of Pittsburgh, which has been saving enough on its helium costs from a recovery system within the Department of Physics and Astronomy that the $1 million Linde Engineering machine is expected to soon have paid for itself.
Pitt now joins other institutions who have invested in such systems. Iowa State, Yale and Harvard have materials online about their respective systems. The designer of the Pitt project, Joseph D. Gibbons of Wilson Architects in Boston, also worked on the Harvard project. The extent of the helium recovery is a good guide for what research is envisioned in the near-future, Gibbons said in a school helium purification equipment statement.