Barber-Nichols is honored to be awarded a contract by NASA Johnson Space Center for the design, manufacture, and test of Ventilation Loop Fans for the Exploration Portable Life Support System (xPLSS) in support of NASA’s next-generation space suit, the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU). The xPLSS being developed for the xEMU will offer many significant…

Barber-Nichols recently adopted a 1.5 mile section of 80th Avenue between Wadsworth and Sheridan as part of the City of Arvada Government’s Adopt-A-Street Program. Our first clean-up day was Saturday December 8th, it was a lot of fun, and we’re already looking forward to the next one in February! Clean Up Day  

Congratulations to Virgin Orbit on completion of Hot Fire Testing of the Newton Three Engine that will be used for LauncherOne’s first orbital test flight!

In preparation for construction of a new 35,000 square foot manufacturing facility Barber-Nichols Inc. (BNI) recently acquired 1.8 acres of land adjacent to its current location in Arvada, Colorado. BNI specializes in the design and manufacture of pumps, turbines, compressors, and controllers for demanding aerospace, defense, scientific, power generation, and commercial/industrial applications. The company has…

Barber-Nichols Inc. (BNI) is pleased to be delivering liquid nitrogen pumps for High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) power transmission cables. HTS cables can transmit more power than traditional cables eliminating the need for infrastructure upgrades as power demands increase. Additionally, HTS cables automatically contain faults, reduce right-of-way requirements, and electromagnetic field interference. The pumps BNI delivered cool…

Barber-Nichols has been selected to design and manufacture a high-speed (30,000 rpm), four-stage water vapor compression system to support the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) with their US Department of Energy ARPA-E Award to develop a more efficient air conditioning system that enables evaporative cooling to be used in humid climates. Evaporative cooling uses less…

Barber-Nichols Inc. (BNI) has been awarded a contract by Fermi National Laboratory to supply liquid argon pumps for use in the ProtoDUNE experimental program at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The hermetically sealed cryogenic pumps will be used to circulate liquid argon, the neutrino target medium, through ultra-clean detectors and provide long-term reliable…

Under a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Phase II Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Grant, Barber-Nichols designed, built and tested a cryogenic compressor capable of densifying liquid hydrogen. Cryogenic propellant densification improves rocket specific impulse (ISP) by allowing a greater mass of cryogenic propellant to be loaded into a given tank volume and if…

Billions of gallons of water are evaporated each year at electric power plants in the U.S. for cooling purposes. As freshwater resources become strained in the U.S. and the rest of the world it is of great interest to find alternative dry air cooling approaches. Standard dry air cooling requires equipment that is very large,…

Barber-Nichols engineers Robert Fuller and David Wehrlen have been granted United States Patent Number US 9,231,504 B2 for a Brushless DC (BLDC) motor electrical control system that increases motor efficiency by reducing pulse width modulation switching frequency to smooth and reduce harmonics present in the motor current waveform. This invention allows the operation of BLDC…