Département des Systèmes Basses Témperatures

The Cryogenic Engineering Department (Département des Systèmes Basses Temperatures or DSBT) is a joint CEA-UGA research laboratory. It’s one of the five laboratories of the Interdisciplinary Research Institute of Grenoble (IRIG), which is part of the Fundamental Research Division (DRF) of CEA.

The activities of DSBT are structured around three pillars: helium cryogenics, hydrogen cryogenics and cryocoolers and space cryogenics. The DSBT’s general objective is to carry outstanding technological developments, and to provide expertise and prototypes for national and international projects where cryogenics is a key issue. The laboratory is a leading R&D performer which develops innovative solutions over a wide spectrum of realization that covers sub-kelvin and cooling powers of fraction of microwatts, to multi-kilowatts at liquid helium temperatures. A specificity of DSBT is its ability to carry out projects from basic research phase (TRL 0) up to technological maturities extending to TRL 9.

 

Video Credit: CEA/A.Ciceron. Video Source: IRIG – CryotechnologyThe laboratory pioneered solutions for cryogenic pellet injectors used in plasma fueling on magnetic-confined fusion machines. This pellet injection technology is now developed for the mitigation of the high energy plasmas for ITER. For the inertial fusion energy, the Laser Mega Joule (LMJ) program has led to the successful development of several challenging cryostats to produce and handle the cryogenic targets. More recently this know-how has triggered the development of the production of solid hydrogen targets for laser-plasma acceleration.

For large cryogenic plants for accelerators and fusion reactor, such as LHC, JT-60 SA, ITER or future HTS based systems, DSBT proposes optimized solutions, focusing on key design aspects such as dealing with variable heat loads using innovative smoothing method demonstrated numerically and experimentally.

In the field of space cryogenics, DSBT has acquired international recognition for its involvement in the Herschel mission, and for the development of the pulse tube coolers for the next generation weather satellite Meteosat 3G. DSBT is focusing now on future space projects, including the development of the 50 mK cooler for the next European large X-Rays mission ATHENA.

DSBT explores new fields in cryogenics and proposes innovative technologies in areas such as turbulence physics, hydrogen cooling and cryogenics for quantum, to name a few.