Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: How OSU’s Helium Recovery System is leading innovation in sustainability

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: How OSU's Helium Recovery System is leading innovation in sustainability

Monday, November 11, 2024

Media Contact: Elizabeth Gosney | CAS Marketing and Communications Manager | 405-744-7497 | [email protected]

After a time of uncertainty and scarcity - when consumers were stockpiling toilet paper and hand sanitizer - things were easing into normalcy in 2022. But that's when a different shortage began plaguing the Oklahoma State University Department of Chemistry.

Due to widespread shortages, helium suppliers nationwide cut the amount of helium consumers could typically purchase. Because liquid helium is essential for conducting chemistry research at OSU, Drs. Margaret Eastman and Jimmie Weaver were challenged to think outside of the box to keep their department's work going. The result was Oklahoma's only helium recovery system (HRS) that liquefies recovered helium gas.

The HRS allows OSU's helium users to recycle their helium output on-site to reduce the amount of gas that boils off into the atmosphere, which renders it useless. This then increases the supply of helium available for use in campus systems.

"There's only so much helium on Earth," Weaver said. "You can't create it. It is one of the most abundant elements in the universe, but it is all up in space and floats up out of our atmosphere. We only get more through nuclear decay."

Without the normal amount of liquid helium, faculty were being forced to evaluate their operations and make a decision about the future of their work.

"When we hit this crisis, it was either find a way to get a system built and move to sustainability where we're using less helium from outside, or collapse," Eastman said. "If we had collapses - like other programs did - that would have been very unfortunate for the future."

Among the department's needs is using liquid helium to cool their Nuclear Magnetic Resonance instruments, or NMR spectrometers, which use magnetic fields to study the structure of molecules. The only way to get a high magnetic field is to cool the magnet down to cryogenic temperatures.

"Nuclei have spin and charge, and that makes them like little magnetic moments, but you don't really see that until you put them in a magnetic field," Eastman said. "In the magnetic field, those little magnetic moments have different energy states, and you can put radio frequency radiation on to get transitions between those states.

"The reason that it's so useful to chemists and for molecular structure is because of the chemical shift."

With OSU's HRS being the only recovery system in the state of Oklahoma, it required Eastman to learn from others around the country how to connect magnets to the system.

"Luckily our spectrometer manufacturer had come out with a manual that I got from someone in the company that gave some recommendations and then I searched online for information and recommendations," Eastman said. "So, I gathered all of that information and kludged it together into what we have."

Once the team had a plan, they had 980 feet of piping laid to connect the system with their machines. The two-inch diameter piping consists of 820 feet of medium density polyethylene (MDPE) and 160 feet of copper.

The piping connects the recovery system to seven NMR magnets - four in the NMR Facility and three owned by faculty in chemistry and chemical engineering - and two rooms available to the physics department.

At most, the helium recovery system can store 400 liters of liquid helium.

"The mother dewar holds 250 liters, and the transport dewar holds 150," Eastman said, explaining that a dewar is an insulated vessel for holding liquid helium. "We'd never likely meet the maximum capacity because helium is always moving through."

Both Weaver and Eastman said that by installing a system for recovery, they are working toward sustainability and long-term cost savings.

"The system is really going to pay for itself," Weaver said. "The cost of helium has gone up about 400% in the last 12 years or so, which has been undermining our ability to support research.

"The system is here and it's ready. It's going to allow us to move forward and continue to grow and be competitive in research."

Without support from the College of Arts and Sciences and university administrators, OSU would be forced to adapt rather than overcome.

"I truly am so grateful for the wisdom of our administrators to support the undertaking," Weaver said. "The chemistry department contributed, and hard choices had to be made about budgets. There was broad agreement amongst the faculty that this was mission critical.

"Roughly half the faculty in the chemistry department use these instruments daily and even more use them occasionally. Without NMR many of us could not perform research at OSU."

Eastman added that without Weaver's advocacy, OSU would not be the leader in innovation that it is today.

"We have this system because of Jimmie," Eastman said. "Jimmie pushed for it, and he recognized early on that we needed this. He didn't leave me alone to figure it out."

Story By: Erin Weaver | [email protected]

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.