Pulse Tube Cryocooler System Research Articles

Effect of Low Temperature on a 4 W/60 K Pulse-Tube Cryocooler for Cooling HgCdTe Detector

Temperature is an extremely important parameter for the material of the space-borne infrared detector. To cool an HgCdTe-infrared detector, a Stirling-type pulse-tube cryocooler (PTC) has been developed based on a great deal of numerical simulations, which are performed to investigate the thermodynamic behaviors of the PTC. The effects of different low temperatures are presented to analyze different energy flows, losses, phase shifts, and impedance matching of the PTC at a temperature range of 40–120 K, where woven wire screens are used. Finally, a high-efficiency coaxial PTC has been designed, built, and tested, operating around 60 K after a number of theoretical and experimental studies. The PTC can offer a no-load refrigeration temperature of 40 K with an input electric power of 150 W, and a cooling power of 4 W at 60 K is obtained with Carnot efficiency of 12%. In addition, a comparative study of simulation and experiment has been carried out, and some studies on reject temperatures have been presented for a thorough understanding of the PTC system.

Numerical Study of a 10 K Two Stage Pulse Tube Cryocooler with Precooling Inside the Pulse Tube

High efficiency cryocoolers working below 10 K have many applications such as cryo-pump, superconductor cooling and cryogenic electronics. This paper presents a thermally coupled two-stage pulse tube cryocooler system and its numeric analysis. The simulation results indicate that temperature distribution in the pulse tube has a significant impact on the system performance. So a precooling heat exchanger is put inside the second stage pulse tube for a deep investigation on its influence on the system performance. The influences of operating parameters such as precooling temperature, location of the precooling heat exchanger are discussed. Comparison of energy losses apparently show the advantages of the configuration which leads to an improvement on the efficiency. Finally, the cryocooler is predicted to be able to reach a relative Carnot efficiency of 10.7% at 10 K temperature.

Numerical simulation of a GM-type pulse tube cryocooler system: Part II. Rotary valve and cold head

A simplified model to characterise a rotary valve is proposed. This model is used inside a complete GM-type pulse tube cryocooler (GMPTC) simulation including the compressor, rotary valve and cold head. The verification of the model is presented including the pressure wave, cooling power and COP by comparing the simulation results to the experimental data of an existing GMPTC system. The exergy losses produced by the compressor, rotary valve and cold head are discussed. This paper is aimed to propose a simulation method which can be applied to analyse and optimise a GMPTC cold head by using the characteristics of a specific compressor and rotary valve.

Numerical simulation of a GM-type pulse tube cryocooler system: Part I. Characterization of compressors

For the numerical simulation of GM-type pulse tube cryocoolers (GMPTCs), several compressors with different input powers were characterised under static conditions, including their mass flow, input power, discharge and suction pressures. Based on the measured data, the relationships between suction volume flow, exergetic efficiency, and pressure ratio were found to be independent of the working gas amount contained in the compressor package. A method to evaluate the volume distribution inside the compressor package was proposed and verified. The empirically determined relations of suction volume flow and exergetic efficiency together with the volume distributions are given for the measured compressors. With these characteristics, the mass flow, electrical input power, discharge and suction pressures of the compressors operating in a GMPTC system can be predicted at various working conditions.

Numerical investigation on a 300 Hz pulse tube cryocooler driven by a three-stage traveling-wave thermoacoustic heat engine

A 300Hz pulse tube cryocooler (PTC) driven by a three-stage traveling-wave thermoacoustic heat engine (TSTHE) has been proposed and studied in this paper. In the configuration, three identical thermoacoustic heat engine units are evenly incorporated in a closed traveling-wave loop, in which three pulse tube cryocoolers are connected to the branch of each thermoacoustic heat engine. Compared with the conventional thermoacoustic heat engine which involves a traveling-wave loop and a long resonator, it has advantages of compact size and potentially high thermal efficiency. A TSTHE–PTC system was designed, optimized and studied in detail based on the thermoacoustic theory. Firstly, numerical simulation was conducted to design the system thus the optimum structure parameters of the system were obtained. With the operating condition of 4MPa mean pressure and high working frequency, a cooling power of 7.75W at 77K and an overall relative Carnot efficiency of 11.78% were achieved. In order to better understand the energy conversion characteristics of the system, distributions of key parameters such as acoustic work, phase difference, dynamic pressure, volume flow rate and exergy loss were presented and discussed. Then, the coupling mechanism of the system was investigated. In addition, influence of coupling position on the system performance was further studied.

Experimental Study of an Aerospace Low Temperature Refrigerator Cooled by a Pulse-tube Cryocooler

Asingle-stage coaxial pulse tube cryocooler (PTC) has been designed, manufactured and tested at ShanghaiInstitute of Technical Physics (SITP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for cooling an aerospace low temperature refrigerator (LTR), whose volume is 20 liters. The LTR system and the PTC system are introduced. Lots of simulations are carried out by CAD/FLUENT for verifying the LTR structure rationality and predicting the inside walls temperature uniformity. Some performance experiments of the LTR have been carried out and analyzedafter coupling with the PTC. The experimental results show that the PTC is capable of cooling the LTR to about average -100oC, so the PTC has a great potential for cooling aerospace LTRs. Some cooling curves are presented and discussed in detail for a thorough understanding of the LTR system.

Conducted EMI Reduction on the Pulse Tube Cryocooler

Pulse tube (PT) cryocoolers can be used to cool SQUIDs, however their electromagnetic interference (EMI) through the conducted high frequency noise currents are normally too large to operate SQUIDs. In this paper, high frequency noise currents of a pulse tube cryocooler system are simultaneously observed at several critical points to analyze conducting paths of the noise currents and to find a solution for this problem. High frequency noise currents are detected by current sensors consisting of a current transformer and a terminating resistor at the secondary side. By covering three-phase power lines and a neutral line connecting the valve motor to the inverter with a copper mesh, and by using it as an additional neutral line, conducted EMI (noise currents) to the cryostat has bee reduced by one fifth. With this treatment, SQUIDs have been operated normally.

Ultra-low-vibration pulse-tube cryocooler system – cooling capacity and vibration

This report describes the development of low-vibration cooling systems with pulse-tube (PT) cryocoolers. Generally, PT cryocoolers have the advantage of lower vibrations in comparison to those of GM cryocoolers. However, cooling systems for the cryogenic laser interferometer observatory (CLIO), which is a gravitational wave detector, require an operational vibration that is sufficiently lower than that of a commercial PT cryocooler. The required specification for the vibration amplitude in cold stages is less than ±1 μm. Therefore, during the development of low-vibration cooling systems for the CLIO, we introduced advanced countermeasures for commercial PT cryocoolers. The cooling performance and the vibration amplitude were evaluated. The results revealed that 4 K and 80 K PT cooling systems with a vibration amplitude of less than ±1 μm and cooling performance of 4.5 K and 70 K at heat loads of 0.5 W and 50 W, respectively, were developed successfully.