Tests of 3 T Superconducting Electromagnetic Iron Separator

A 3 T central field Superconducting Electromagnetic Iron Separator (SEIS) has been designed, fabricated and tested at Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of China. The SEIS system is deliberately designed to separate small pieces of hazardous ferromagnetic materials, such as detonators, from coal to achieve high purity and good yield. The SEIS system mainly consists of a NbTi superconducting magnet, a LHe recondensation type cryostat with two GM cryocoolers (31 W/40 K, 1 W/4.2 K), a pair of binary current leads (CL). The 1 ton cold mass was located in the cryostat of the system with 630 mm room temperature bore. The system is powered with a 250 A/50 V power supply, and has charging time and discharging time of 15 minutes and 20 minutes, respectively. It took 10 days for SEIS magnet to cool down from 300 K to 4.2 K and 6 days to accumulate LHe at designed level 360 mm. The SEIS magnet suffered no quench to reach its designed current, and operated stably during many experiments afterwards. The experiment research of the SEIS system is detailedly presented in this paper.