3D printed suspension and its evaluation in an ADR refrigerator

Abstract

The salt pill suspensions play a critical role in determining the performance of adiabatic demagnetization refrigerators (ADR). Kevlar suspensions are commonly used to hold the salt pill in place and to minimize the thermal leak. However, traditional solutions such as tensioning the Kevlar and fixing it on mechanical frame with the help of epoxy or running it around a pulley are quite challenging. This paper presents an innovative suspension using 3D printing technology and a polyether ether ketone (PEEK) multi-ring suspension has been designed and tested. Numerical analysis shows that a single piece of the suspension may contribute about 1.10 μW thermal leak between 4 K and 0.3 K. To test its performance, a two-stage ADR is built with Gadolinium Gallium Garnet (GGG) as the first stage and chromium potassium alum (CPA) salt pill as the second stage which is supported by the PEEK suspension. The GGG stage is mainly used to provide an initial temperature for CPA stage. Typically, starting from 1 K@4 T, a no-load lowest temperature of 66.1 mK is achieved at a demagnetization rate of 0.005 T/s in the experiments. The thermal leak of the PEEK suspension with and without 1 K heat sink has been analyzed and compared, with the former one showing a big reduction of the thermal leak. This paper confirms the feasibility of PEEK as an ADR suspension material and provides a potential 3D printing method for complex suspension designs.