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영어

This paper presents apparent thermal conductivity of various powder at different vacuum levels for cryogenic insulation. Four kinds of powder insulator are examined by using boil-off calorimetry at pressure range from 50 Torr to 3 mTorr. The first material is perlite which is widely used in cryogenic application. Microsphere is the second one that is recently proposed as a replacement powder for liquid hydrogen storage tanks. It is a hollow sphere made of silica with the diameter in the order of 10 to 100 μm. Popped rice and polystyrene beads are also selected as candidates for powder insulation even though they are polymers. With their porous elliptic and spherical configuration and light density, they demonstrate fairly good thermal insulation performance at pressure range from 50 Torr to 3 mTorr. According to the experimental investigation in this paper, microsphere and polystyrene beads possess promising insulation characteristic as powder insulators and further study is desired.