Helium is a highly specialized product. It’s chemically inert and non-flammable, with high thermal conductivity, low molecular weight and size, and the lowest boiling point known. The main global industrial consumers of liquid helium are the medical, aerospace, and electronics industries. 

From manufacturing to flight, helium is widely utilized throughout the aerospace and aircraft industry. In space flight operations, helium is used to purge hydrogen systems and works as a pressurizing agent for ground and flight fluid systems. It is also a source of lift in weather and other surveillance balloons.

 

Helium is used to test critical automotive parts such as radiator heat exchangers, air conditioning components, fuel tanks and torque converters to ensure they meet quality specifications. It is also used in combination with argon as a source of inflation in a growing number of airbags.

In combination with oxygen, helium is used in diving to help eliminate nitrogen narcosis, reduce breathing resistance at depth, and shorten decompression stops. Known as heliox, the mixture allows divers to reach greater depths for longer periods of time. The deeper the dive, the higher the concentration of helium, allowing divers to explore more and weld longer.

Helium's inert properties at arc temperatures make it an ideal gas for welding materials with high heat conductivity such as aluminum, stainless steel, copper and magnesium alloys. Helium is also used in heat treating processes such as gas quenching and in furnace atmospheres to produce parts with higher tolerance and improved quality. Accordingly, there is growing demand for helium in various high-tech applications such as cryogenics, welding and pressure & purging, in addition to more recent developments which include hybrid air vehicles and helium-filled hard drives. Space exploration is another key growth area, as is quantum computing, and liquid helium has been called “the lifeblood of low-temperature physics.”

 

Helium plays a significant role in the manufacturing of semiconductors, LCD panels, and fiber optic wire. It cools parts and components quickly to enhance throughput, controls the rate of heat transfer to improve productivity and reduce defects, and functions as a carrier gas in the production process.

 

The medical industry, however, is the largest consumer of helium, both gas and liquid, and mainly uses helium to maintain the superconducting properties of magnets in applications such as magnetic resonance imagery (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry (NMR) equipment. Helium is used to achieve cryogenic temperatures of -451 degrees required for superconducting magnets in MRIs and NMRs, allowing the capture of high-resolution images of internal organs and tissues. Because of its exceptionally low boiling point (approximately -269°C), liquid helium is used to cool NMR and MRI magnets to the point where their electrical resistance is virtually non-existent and they become superconducting.