Particle physics breeds aerospace tech

摘要

In their quest to unlock the secrets of the universe, researchers at Europe's CERN organizaton needed a machine capable of managing temperatures of 5-5 trillion degrees Celsius - more than 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. That's the amount of heat CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland creates when it smashes subatomic particles together in an effort to replicate the conditions immediately after the Big Bang and identify the smallest building blocks of matter. Experts at CERN - a French acronym for the European Organization for Nuclear Research - also see practical aerospace applications for their thermal-management and other technological innovations. The Large Hadron Collider contains collimators - devices that narrow the high-energy beams in particle accelerators but generate intense heat in the process. To handle even-higher-energy beams that would open new avenues of basic research, CERN technology analysts have produced "the highest thermal-conductive materials ever developed," said Enrico Chesta, head of the Technology Transfer Section in CERN's Knowledge Transfer Group, in an interview. The new metal-diamond and metal-graphite composites - lightweight materials with high operating temperatures and high thermal conductivity that are resistant to thermal expansion - "could play an important role in helping to manage the high temperatures generated by equipment such as satellite electronics and could even have a role in dissipating the high volumes of heat on a re-entry capsule shield or within the combustor chamber of an aeroengine," he added.