A novel rapid cooling assembly design in a high-pressure Cubic Press apparatus

In traditional high pressure-temperature assembly design, priority has been given to temperature insulation and retention at high pressures. This limits the efficiency of cooling samples at the end of experiments, negatively impacting many studies in the field of high-pressure earth and planetary science. Inefficient cooling of experiments containing molten phases at high temperature leads to the formation of quench textures, which makes it impossible to quantify key compositional parameters of the original molten phase, such as their volatile contents.

Here, we designed a novel, low-cost experimental assembly for rapid cooling in a six-anvil cubic press. This assembly not only retains high heating efficiency and thermal insulation, but also enables a very high cooling rate (~600 °C/s from 1900 °C to the glass transition temperature). Without using expensive materials or external modification of the press, the cooling rate in an assembly (~600 °C/s) with cube lengths of 38.5 mm is about ten times faster than the traditional assembly (~60 °C/s). Experiments have shown that the heterogeneous quenched textures produced with the traditional assembly, does not shown with the novel rapid cooling assembly design.