Liquid Helium Bath Free, Conduction Cooled Nb3Sn Superconducting 7 Tesla Plus Mag

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant For tesla full body MRI bore magnet systems NbTi superconductor wire has reached its limit at K Above T if NbTi is used it requires super cooling of helium to K to achieve T bore MRI and NMR systems All these T full body MRI background magnets sold by Siemens Philips and GE have been manufactured by Aligent formerly known at Varian before that Magnex Aligent recently announced that they will no longer accept orders for these T magnets and sited costs and availability of helium Some MRI manufacturers have stopped accepting new order for T MRIs because of delivery issues and helium shortages The medical community would like to see T MRIandapos s become a clinical system Hence the price needs to come down dramatically and in the long run the only real solution is to have conduction cooled magnets to take the helium shortage issue out of the equation Nb Sn superconductor wire is the ideal candidate for these applications due to its higher current density at higher field like T Plus the transition temperature Tc is higher K for Nb Sn vs K for NbTi When a large NbTi magnet is cooled in a liquid helium bath the temperature differential in the coil needs to be less than K At K Nb Sn still retains over its engineering current density to enable the design of T magnetic fields in the bore of large magnets and it provides the K margin to enable conduction cooling and can eliminate the need for liquid helium bath cooling This eliminates the need for liters of helium every time the magnet needs to be cooled down training the magnet in the factory setting up the magnet at the hospital and when the magnet quenches several times over its useful life cycle of years What enables our specific aim of large conduction cooled Nb Sn magnets for medical applications is that Hyper Tech has developed a low cost and high performance tube type Nb Sn superconductor which is an excellent wire candidate to open up this market With the increase in performance it can economically enable conduction cooled magnets and eliminate the helium batch cooling This new Hyper Tech lower cost high performance Jc of A mm at K T Nb Sn superconductor wire could cut the wire cost compared to NbTi wire for a Tesla full body MRI It would dramatically decrease the magnet weight and size It will also make the conduction cooling possible for the K range During this Fast Track Phase I and Phase II project we will demonstrate that a new low cost Nb Sn superconductor developed by Hyper Tech can be used to fabricate large conduction cooled cm bore coils for T tesla MRI and NMR systems This will benefit the public for MRI and NMR applications that require high resolution and rapid imaging This matches NIHandapos s mission of delivering cost effective improved health care to the public PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE Hyper Tech will conduct research and development on conduction cooled large bore T plus Nb Sn superconducting magnets for MRI NMR and Medical Particle Accelerators The development of these large conduction cooled magnets will enable these markets to avoid the predicted helium shortage by eliminating helium bath cooling for these magnets In addition the magnet systems will lower cost be safer and less prone to quenching than presently used NbTi or Nb Sn helium bath cooled superconducting magnet systems