Creavey Seal Company and Northern Engineering do their bit in the search for Dark Matter by providing the ‘DarkSide50’ Project with high-grade O Ring seals

Creavey Seal Company and Northern Engineering have been supplying high quality O Ring seals to The Gran Sasso National Laboratory for many months, and recently for the ‘DarkSide50’ project – the high profile subterranean scientific search for dark matter 1,400m under the Italian Gran Sasso mountain range.

Astronomical evidence indicates that about 22% of the Universe is made up of non-baryonic dark matter. Several lines of arguments indicate that dark matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), exotic relics of the Big Bang that exist till today due to their weak interactions with ordinary matter. Understanding the nature of the dark matter is one of the most important open questions in cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics today.

·      Astrophysicists calculate that there isn't enough visible matter to explain the rotation of galaxies

·      They proposed a type of matter that we can't detect in the normal way - dark matter

·      You can't see dark matter directly with telescopes, but its gravitational effect can be seen on visible matter

·      Dark matter should be all around us, so scientists are developing new ways to detect these mysterious particles

The equipment needed for such research is impressive.  Inside a huge tank filled with 1,000 tons of ultra-pure deionized water, is a large metal sphere containing a ‘scintillator’ detector filled with 30 tons of aromatic solvents.  The spherical container also holds a cryostat filled with 50 kg of special argon with extremely low radioactivity, extracted by the physicists from very deep wells in the USA.

 

Clearly, such equipment is highly sensitive and expensive to run.  The last thing the Gran Sasso scientists would want is for a ‘simple’ seal to fail, thereby ruining an experiment or, worst case, distorting valuable data. 

Owing to the fact that Creavey Seals and Northern Engineering carefully control the extrusion of the raw materials in-house using highly accurate laser monitoring equipment, and that fact that they have long-standing supply relationships with the likes of DuPont™ for high-grade and pure materials, they are able to provide fail-safe O Rings that give such critical applications the reliability they need.

One of the Creavey Seal O Ring configurations provided to the DarkSide50 project, is the Creavey Astra Seal – an impressive DuPont™Teflon® encapsulated sprung metal seal used in cryogenic applications in such industries as space, aerospace & defense, food and pharmaceutical and LNG storage etc.  Being the originator of such technology, Creavey Seal Company has a strong history of providing this sealing solution to these demanding markets.

The Creavey Astra Seal