_Regenerative Cooling._--One part of the problem being thus solved and a
satisfactory device discovered for warding off heat in such vacuum
vessels, it remained to arrange some practically efficient method for
reducing hydrogen to a temperature sufficiently low for liquefaction. To
gain that end, the idea naturally occurred of using adiabatic expansion,
not intermittently, as when gas is allowed to expand suddenly from a
high compression, but in a continuous process, and an obvious way of
attempting to carry out this condition was to enclose the orifice at
which expansion takes place in a tube, so as to obtain a constant stream
of cooled gas passing over it. But further consideration of this plan
showed that although the gas jet would be cooled near the point of
expansion owing to the conversion of a portion of its sensible heat into
dynamical energy of the moving gas, yet the heat it thus lost would be
restored to it almost immediately by the destruction of this mechanical
energy through friction and its consequent reconversion into heat. Thus
the net result would be _nil_ so far as change of temperature through
the performance of external work was concerned. But the conditions in
such an arrangement resemble that in the experiments of Thomson and
Joule on the thermal changes which occur in a gas when it is forced
under pressure through a porous plug or narrow orifice, and those
experimenters found, as the former of them had predicted, that a change
of temperature does take place, owing to internal work being done by the
attraction of the gas molecules. Hence the effective result obtainable
in practice by such an attempt at continuous adiabatic expansion as that
suggested above is to be measured by the amount of the "Thomson-Joule
effect," which depends entirely on the internal, not the external, work
done by the gas. To Linde belongs the credit of having first seen the
essential importance of this effect in connexion with the liquefaction
of gases by adiabatic expansion, and he was, further, the first to
construct an industrial plant for the production of liquid air based on
the application of this principle.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Laboratory Liquid Air Machine.
A, Air or oxygen inlet.
B, Carbon dioxide inlet.
C, Carbon dioxide valve.
D, Regenerator coils.
F, Air or oxygen expansion valve.
G, Vacuum vessel with liquid air or oxygen.
H, Carbon dioxide and air outlet.
O, Air coil.
O, Carbon dioxide coil.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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