Recovery of helium refrigerator performance for cryogenic hydrogen system at J-PARC MLF

Aso, Tomokazu ; Teshigawara, Makoto   ; Hasegawa, Shoichi   ; Muto, Hideki; Aoyagi, Katsuhiro; Nomura, Kazutaka; Takada, Hiroshi   

At J-PARC's pulsed spallation neutron source, a cryogenic hydrogen system has been operated to provide liquid para-hydrogen (20K and 1.5 MPa) to the moderators since 2008. Typical operating period of the cryogenic hydrogen system was approximately 3 months continuously. However, the pressure differences between No.1, No.2 heat exchangers (HXs) and an adsorber (ADS) in the helium refrigerator had begun to increase rapidly since the beginning of 2015, the refrigerator could not be operated continuously. The impurity in the refrigerator was measured by newly introduced quadrat mass spectrometer, but no significant impurities was observed. We suspected the oil contamination from the helium compressor, as it caused performance degradation of the cryogenic system in other facilities, such as RIKEN, CERN, etc. In the summer outage in 2016, we cleaned the HXs with Freon to remove the oil contamination, and replaced the activate charcoals of ADS and oil separator (OS-5). As a result, the performance of the helium refrigerator was recovered completely.