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How a Helium Leak Disabled Every iPhone In a Medical Facility (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: In one of the strangest system admin tales of all time, one IT guy details how a new MRI machine managed to disable every single iPhone, Apple watch and iPad in a medical facility while leaving the rest of the devices untouched. Eric Woolridge, a system administrator at Morris Hospital in Illinois, said in a detailed post on the r/sysadmin subreddit that helium was to blame for the malfunctioning iPhones. "[T]he MRI installation involves supercooling the giant magnet in the machine by boiling off liquid helium," reports Motherboard. "This evaporated helium is usually pumped out of the facility through a vent, but this vent was leaking the helium into the rest of the facility. In all, about 120 liters of helium (or about 90,000 cubic meters in its gaseous state) was pumped out of the MRI room and an untold amount leaked into the rest of the hospital."
In a blog post, iFixit notes that helium atoms can wreak havoc on MEMS silicon chips. "MEMS are microelectromechanical systems that are used for gyroscopes and accelerometers in phones, and helium atoms are small enough to mess up the way these systems function," reports Motherboard. What's odd is that Android phones were not affected. Apparently, the reason "is because Apple recently defected from traditional quartz-based clocks in its phones in favor of clocks that are also made of MEMS silicon," reports Motherboard. "Given that clocks are the most critical device in any computer and are necessary to make the CPU function, their disruption with helium atoms is enough to crash the device."
In a blog post, iFixit notes that helium atoms can wreak havoc on MEMS silicon chips. "MEMS are microelectromechanical systems that are used for gyroscopes and accelerometers in phones, and helium atoms are small enough to mess up the way these systems function," reports Motherboard. What's odd is that Android phones were not affected. Apparently, the reason "is because Apple recently defected from traditional quartz-based clocks in its phones in favor of clocks that are also made of MEMS silicon," reports Motherboard. "Given that clocks are the most critical device in any computer and are necessary to make the CPU function, their disruption with helium atoms is enough to crash the device."
They use PMT tubes, and helium will leak thru glass seals easily, which is what happened to these chips.
They all changed frequency, and aren't working right. :)
The PMT's will just arc internally, glowing a nice bright orange, if you could see them. :D
It will drop the power supply rails, and there's no fixing the tubes, they'll have to be replaced.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Using MEMS instead of a quartz crystal is like using an inscribed candle instead of a pendulum. It's a major step in the wrong direction.
Apple may have saved a whole 2 cents per $1000 phone by doing that.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
They quit using quartz based clocks?
Why?
Oh, I know there will be some clever reason why the change is superior. This story just points out where 'clever' sometimes leads.
So we can discreetly pop a canister of helium on the bus to kill all the iGadgets?
Obviously the helium concentration wasn't very high -- people could breathe and talk without sounding like Alvin the Chipmunk. I wonder if this can be exploited to mess with iPhone-owning hipsters at a party -- a balloon inflator sized helium tank and the appropriate valve orifice should do it...
OMG! My phone just died! *head explodes*
They could have upgraded their MRI to new ones that do not need to consume so much liquid helium in the first place.
http://mriquestions.com/liquid...
In fact, new types of MRI machine no longer require liquid helium !!
You can expect the next generation of superconducting MR scanners to contain no cryogens at all. This is largely due to the development of efficient pulse tube and 2-stage Gifford-McMahon (G-M) cryocoolers that are able to maintain temperatures below the 9.4ÂK required for NbTi superconductivity without liquid helium
If the helium concentration was high enough to affect phones this way, they're lucky it didn't displace too much oxygen and freaking kill people.
They really should have sensors to detect these conditions in places where large amounts of gas is used.
Helium detector.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
He ruined my phone, how dare He?! What have I ever done to He?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Reminder that helium is mined from the earth, can not be recovered once it's in the atmosphere, and until we start fusing hydrogen atoms, is non-renewable.
If it has important industrial applications, why are we still filling balloons at children's parties with it?
Because they're idiots who don't realize what they're dealing with, that's why.
The only way to prevent such waste is to increase the price of helium to such a point that everyone dealing with helium, when possible, will try to re-capture it once it's been used.
#DeleteFacebook
Siri (in elevated voice): What can I help you with?
You're a genius. You bring the butterfly nets, I'll bring the tweezers
Helium goes right through solid objects.
Plastics have molecules, and holes between molecules, about 25,000 times larger than a helium atom. Helium gas is normally single atoms, not molecules.
That's the challenge with helium hard drives. If you try to use a typical rubber seal, the holes between rubber molecules are much larger than helium atoms, allowing the helium to go right through almost as if the rubber wasn't there.
You may have noticed a helium balloon stops floating overnight. That's because the helium goes out right through the rubber. Interestingly, air leaks INTO the balloon due to something called partial pressure.
Pretty sure you need a helium net... Who wants to catch butterflys?
The user manual says gases like helium can damage the phone.
exposing iPhone to environments having high concentrations of industrial chemicals, including near evaporating liquified gasses such as helium, may damage or impair iPhone functionality
From the sounds of it, the amount needed even makes it a viable technique just for culling the herd at crowded nightclubs, or when you get to the restaurant and there is an hour + wait!
I'm sure at $120k/fill they would love to do this. The problem is how. This is many liters of highly compressed helium that has to escape somewhere in very short time in order to demagnetize the room in case of emergency.
In most cases (as in this), the valve/pipe to the outside simply freezes and the helium dumps through the room via other ways.
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It doesn't seem that hard to recapture the helium. Just put the fill nozzle to a blimp at the vent. Once the blimp is filled up, fly it to the helium recovery plant where they will liquify it again and reuse it.
dom
No. Although you're right on with your view of Corporate America, the impending Helium Shortfall is Worldwide. You fail like most to understand just where Terrestrial Helium comes from. It's the result of billions of years of very slow Alpha Decay from Actinides way deep down. Practically all of it migrates upwards and escapes, first into the atmosphere, and then into space. But in certain kinds of crustal conditions, like in Natural Gas pockets, some of the Helium hangs around. However, most Natural Gas contains little to no measurable Helium at all. (Helium unlike Hydrogen forms no natural Molecular compounds to bind it, at least down here. Yes, we can make Helium Hydride... for a short time and with incredible difficulty. This I have actually done.)
Alpha Decay can't reasonably be speeded up, unlike say Fission, so we are utterly dependent on natural processes here. But wait, there's more!
4He is the result of Alpha Decay from the Actinides. But 3He is the result of the Beta decay from Tritium. Tritium is Primordial here; all of the Tritium within the Earth decayed quite quickly, billions of years ago, leaving 3He in some of those same Gas pockets. At least on Earth, the only sources of new Tritium, and its decay product 3He, comes from our Nuclear Reactors.
I was once involved in the design of a new kind of Neutrino Detector that needed 3He, quite a lot of it. Even at the cut rate prices that the Russians were offering, and that they couldn't deliver in the volume needed, the Detector would have needed some ~$200 Billion in 3He. The design was cancelled.
And for this very reason, absolutely crazy schemes have been put forth to mine 3He from the surface of the Moon, where it is continually produced due to the Solar Wind that our own Magnetic Field protects us from.
But why 3He? What makes it so important?
Aneutronic Fusion.
Liquid helium costs about $5 per liter. So 120 liters is worth about $600. No recovery effort could possibly be cost effective for such a small leak.
Also 120 liters of liquid Helium is NOT 90,000 cubic meters of gas. It is about 90 cubic meters.
I'm sure at $120k/fill ...
Who said it costs $120k/fill? TFA does not say that. It says 120 liters, which costs about $1k.
Background: I'm on the technical team for a research unit that has an MRI machine of its own and access to another. Plus I do Helium refills for an MEG facility. This does not ring true. An MRI is going to have something like 500L of liquid helium in it. It doesn't cool by "Boiling it off". In fact a high boil-off rate is a bad thing. The unit will have a chiller to keep the temperature of the helium down and probably a recondenser to reduce loss. If the unit quenched during install then all the helium will have boiled off. A lot more than 120L. Also the vents are certified so that *All* the helium that boils off goes up and out safely. Add to that all these facilities have O2 alarm systems, this must have been a very small, slow leak over the course of months. Any leaking helium will have risen straight up to the ceiling and spread out, maybe working its way up into cracks and passing to above floors at a massively reduced concentration. At the levels we're talking about here, if the helium were the problem then we'd be seeing a spate of iPhone failures at children's parties from the helium in the balloons.
... when applied to other peoples expensive Apple gadgets.
I think it's more likely that an electromagnetic pulse fried the Apple products. The MRI 5-gauss line is only applicable in steady state operations. When the 500-1000a current in the super conducting coils ramps up or down, it's got a hell of a kick. Leave the electronics in the car when they come to re-charge the coils.
Well, they really can't know how much it costs until they run your credit. That's why the hospital admit form asks for everything on a credit app. For major bills, has anyone noticed that the bill is your available cash + available credit + at least 1 year salary? There is a reason they will NOT post pricing up front.
:/
CSB: I paid in full for 3 days of EEG monitoring/reading results etc ($2,600). The company switched the bill from an in network shell, to an out of network shell then changed the charges to $30k/Day and added the day to add and remove the monitoring to make it 5 days for a $150k total. They had language in the original consent for saying 'may be billed under a different name'.
Yes, the raw helium may only cost $1k but the cost of ramping a magnet up/down is a lot more. In case of Siemens MRI, they have to fly in special equipment from Germany overnight (a few pallets of basically giant transformers and BeCu tools, shims etc), the repairs associated with a magnet quench are a few thousand (usually you have to outright replace the valves and various other parts that froze) and then it takes a few hours of carefully charging the magnet and monitoring while the helium is slowly being filled. Hopefully you only have to do this once as it is possible that other issues or leaks are found and the helium you just filled boils off. All the while you are paying for at least 3 engineers and the helium delivery guy.
I've been involved with MRI magnet quenches, they're not pretty or cheap. The helium is practically worthless, I've heard of some sites that rather let helium boil off at a certain rate than get a repair done.
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Yes, the raw helium may only cost $1k but the cost of ramping a magnet up/down is a lot more. In case of Siemens MRI, they have to fly in special equipment from Germany overnight (a few pallets of basically giant transformers and BeCu tools, shims etc), the repairs associated with a magnet quench are a few thousand (usually you have to outright replace the valves and various other parts that froze) and then it takes a few hours of carefully charging the magnet and monitoring while the helium is slowly being filled. Hopefully you only have to do this once as it is possible that other issues or leaks are found and the helium you just filled boils off. All the while you are paying for at least 3 engineers and the helium delivery guy.
I've been involved with MRI magnet quenches, they're not pretty or cheap. The helium is practically worthless, I've heard of some sites that rather let helium boil off at a certain rate than get a repair done.
Sounds like the market is ripe for 3rd party repair vendors. Pity this is healthcare we're talking about, so that probably won't happen.
Fixing utility-scale electrical generators in the 1970s and early 1980s used to be an OEM-only affair. Then subvendors started popping up that could handle X subrepair, supply such and such subset of parts, etc. Nowadays there are plenty of companies that can handle all the repairs start-to-finish, a vast network of subcontractors, and the OEMs have been run off a lot of power plants because of their price-gouging and pushy salesmen.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Also 120 liters of liquid Helium is NOT 90,000 cubic meters of gas. It is about 90 cubic meters.
Sure, for the first second after the leak. That's the thing about leaks.
But actually, yes, good spot.
They do. Scanners normally come with zero boil off systems standard now.
The story in the summary sounds pretty fishy. The story on Reddit is sort of similar but with a lot of "it might have been this but I don't know."
Helium manufacturers take the vents very seriously because if the magnet quenches *all* the helium is going to very quickly boil. 120 L (comes in a can about the size of a BBQ propane canister) boiled off through a leak and dispersed doesn't sound likely to damage anything. The concentration would be very low, and helium floats.
The papers on MEMs and helium do say there's an effect, but they test in pure, pressurized helium atmospheres (inside a pressure vessel) and report slow drift.
Carrying a phone through the magnetic field of a scanner could kill it. During ramping people might have found excuses to wander by and watch.
Nope. You forgot to convert from liters to m^3. 120L liquid * (754 L gas/L liquid) = 90,480 liters of gas. And 1m3 = 1000L, so that's only 90.5m^3
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Liquid helium costs about $5 per liter.
What grade helium are you talking about. The stuff you use for balloons is a much lower grade and much cheaper than what is used in a MRI scanner. He for a scanner was $5 back in 2010. That's not what it costs currently.
No recovery effort could possibly be cost effective for such a small leak
Most scanners that were built in the last 20 years do recover the He that leaks out as part of their normal operations. But you can't capture it when you need to quench the scanner. It's simply not safe to do. He displaces oxygen 28:1. With a typical magnet using 2000 liters of helium, you don't fuck around during a quench because you are likely to asphyxiate a lot of people.
I made much the same point, but with less colorful language. Because of the Physics involved, Tritium contamination would need to be way less than a part per Trillion, to bring Background Noise down to reasonable levels. Russia was quoting us about $10K a gram delivered in liquid 3He form with the required purity, which sounds like a lot, but it was half the price that we were going to have to charge ourselves. (The US/Canadian Governments do have their own Reactors...)
The sphere for the Neutrino Detector would need about 20 Tonnes of liquid 3He. So we built SNO instead. (FWIW, it would have taken two decades or so for Russia, going full bore, to make that much Tritium=>3He...)
3He was a far better choice. SNO had only about 0.01% of the Detector Efficiency using 1,000 Tonnes of Heavy Water; but it was still just good enough to snag a 2015 Nobel Physics prize.
The "Urban Legend" about needing $200B of 3He for various purposes came right from our Feasibility Studies starting in 1991. Here is a Source for another "Urban Legend":
Whether on a Submarine or Land Based, there are stories about Reactors shutting themselves down for unexplained reasons, only to find out that flushing a particular Toilet caused this. It wasn't a Reactor; it was the Berkeley Bevatron. Because there were so few Women working there originally, there was only one Women's Bathroom, hastily added only when the need was found pressing enough. The Plumbers just tapped into an available but unlabeled Water line, that just happened to provide the Water to the MG Room Ignitrons. Flush the toilet, which happened rarely, and the Water pressure would sometimes drop just low enough to trigger the Ignitrons into dumping ~15MW back into the Grid. Very quickly, and with unintended consequences. It took about a decade to figure this out.
Oh, one last thing: Berkelium does not rhyme with Helium...
Captcha: gabbing
It is cheap now but what happens when it becomes scarce? How many other things are causing issues now because the cost of recovery isn't worth the cost to just waste it?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
What grade helium are you talking about. The stuff you use for balloons is a much lower grade and much cheaper than what is used in a MRI scanner. He for a scanner was $5 back in 2010. That's not what it costs currently.
Just did a google search and I found this blog site "MRI Helium Refills and Boil-off Rates: The Top Six Magnets" talking about He. The blog was written in Feb 2017 though.
Helium is a commodity and the market price per liter fluctuates periodically. In the last year, we have heard from people getting it for as low as $9.00 per liter or as high as $20.00 per liter.