this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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And have liquid Helium to cool the magnet coils so they become superconducting. Liquid helium is at 4 Kelvin!
Taking a cramped antique elevator with strange signs down into a basement with equipment holding mindboggling technology used to scan your body has a real cyberpunk vibe.
Or to put it into other words - unless these machines are incredibly cool, the electricity running through the magnets will start to heat up the magnets, causing their resistance to increase, causing them to heat up even further... eventually causing them to become incredibly hot if you're lucky, or explode if you're unlucky.
Now, I've never caused an MRI magnet to quench. But it's just as scary when it happens in a cryostat. :<
Before you people are scared to use a MRI now: I can not imagine that they don't have multiple safeties in place to avoid explosion. I've never worked on cryo stuff, but from regularly cooled big machines, there are always redundant measures to avoid the big boom, and where there aren't, you can identify them by the scary sign and the heavy breathing of the safety officer. And that is for internal stuff, patient/customer facing things are probably treated even more carefully
Oh yeah, sorry, didn't mean to scare people! Even if it catastrophically explodes, there's zero chance anything can happen to you. There's so much stuff between you and the magnet that even the worst case will just damage the machine.
In the event of a quench, there's no explosion. Just a venting of the (now) gaseous helium. Still don't want to be in it during, not no actual explosion.
The good news is, there's no way for these machines to not be incredibly cool.
Oh, is that ensured mechanically? That's really cool, do you have any links or similar? I always love learning about this kinda stuff!
I was making a joke about the two main meanings of cool.
MRI machines are really cool, like they're neat. I'm sure they can heat up, but their design is still pretty awesome.
They also use liquid nitrogen to help keep the liquid helium cold. Mainly because liquid helium is expensive and a finite resource. So the nitrogen is "topped up" much more frequently than the helium.