Articles and Applications

1. Gas Source Helium is becoming increasingly expensive with reports of its price having doubled in some regions between 2013 and 2015. Added to its increased price, supply cannot be ensured in certain regions which is increasing the number of labs looking to change to hydrogen.

Talk of a helium crisis following the shortage of 2012/13 appears to have subsided thanks to increased worldwide production, with labs now readily able to obtain helium. Here we look at what has happened over the last 2 years since the global helium shortage was the hot topic in GC, where do we currently stand and what is the outlook in the short term?

Helium is well known as Helium that makes balloons and airships float and in its liquid form, Helium is used in a variety of applications including cooling for magnets in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners, cooling infrared detectors, and as a superconductor coolant in the large hadron collider at CERN.

Although there is now less concern about its availability, the price of helium is set to continue to increase meaning that cost-effective alternatives are still attractive to analytical labs.

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, but on Earth it’s relatively rare, found trapped underground with natural gas and in the atmosphere, where it escapes into space.