New Facility at MARIN Offers More Control Over our Climate

On 19 October 2020 Eppo Bruins, Member of Parliament for the ChristenUnie, officially opened ‘The  Atmosphere’, a new facility at MARIN. This autoclave of 15m long and 2.5m diameter offers  researchers a new level of control over variables like temperature, pressure, gas composition,  humidity and liquids to simulate a wide variety of conditions and to research causes and solutions for  the challenges they face.

Multi-purpose testing facility

The Atmosphere is a multi-purpose testing facility used for fundamental research, product development  and process optimization. The Atmosphere consists of a precisely controlled environment wherein  researchers can control the pressure, temperature and gas composition, to generate a diverse range of  conditions. Hannes Bogaert, founding father of The Atmosphere at MARIN: ‘Temperature rise,  greenhouse gas, particles, drought, rise in water levels, aerosols … the climate in which we live is  changing rapidly without our seeming to have any control over it. The Atmosphere is about taking back  control by researching sustainable solutions. With its wide range of control The Atmosphere offers  unique possibilities to do so.’ 

Range of control

The controlled environment is a cylindrical autoclave with a diameter of 2.5 m and a length of 15 m.  Liquids and gases can be circulated through the autoclave, and their temperature can be independently controlled in a range from 15°C to 200 °C. The autoclave can be depressurized down to 5 mbar, and  pressurized up to 10 bar absolute with a precision of ±2.5 mbar. Gas compositions of nitrogen, helium,  sulphur hexafluoride or steam/water vapour can be created with an accuracy of ±1 volume percent. The  76.5 m3 autoclave can accommodate set-ups of up to 8000 kg which can be connected to gas and liquid  connections. 

24/7 measurements

The autoclave is equipped with 17 inspection glasses with a viewing diameter of 200 mm, multiple  flanges for instrumentation, and feedthroughs for shaft drives that can be connected to equipment  inside the autoclave. 23 sensors measure the temperature in the liquid and gas. Additionally, the inside  of the autoclave is observed with 2 high-speed cameras (up to 100 000 fps) and 4 low-speed cameras  (up to 200 fps) The level of liquid inside the set-ups can be measured and controlled within a 0.1 mm  accuracy. The facility is fully automated and can perform measurements 24/7.

The Atmosphere is the product of a collaboration between fundamental science and applied research. It  has been designed and built within SLING, a research and innovation project of the Netherlands  Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Eppo Bruins: ‘Twenty years ago these were two different  worlds, but we managed to evolve them in a multi-disciplinary field. This government had shown its firm  conviction that knowledge is the real engine of the future of our country. The budget for science and  innovation has grown structurally in the past years, and the government intends to further increase  spending through the Growth Fund announced last September.’

Herry Nijhuis, director of NWO domain Applied and Engineering Sciences: ‘The Atmosphere is a unique  facility for the Dutch research community. And through the contribution of NWO, it is open to all NWO  partners at operational costs only. It is very important that such facilities come to the Netherlands, and  the researchers that work with it.’

SLING

The Atmosphere's first achievement is SLING. SLING brings the knowledge enabling optimal design and  operation of cryogenic fuel tanks. The international shipping organization wants to emit fifty percent  less C02 by 2050, and is focusing on natural gas, hydrogen, et cetera. At sea one has to store these fuels  in liquid form by extremely cooling them. This requires special fuel tanks that must withstand wave  impacts from the sloshing ‘boiling’ fuel in the tank. Scientists in The Atmosphere work with the industry  to unravel the complex physics of those wave impacts.
Eric Dehouck, deputy CEO of GTT: ‘The design loads are determined by sloshing model tests.  Measurements on board a LNG carrier showed that the results obtained at small scale with model tests  are conservative. But we wanted more than that: we want an optimal balance between mechanical  strength and thermal efficiency of the fuel tank for each project. The only way is to improve our  knowledge on sloshing physics. This is the objective of SLING.’