Theoretical and experimental investigation of pressure drop and refrigeration effect in pulse tube cryocooler

Abstract

The design of a highly efficient pulse tube cryocooler (PTC) is a subject of recent research activities. The PTC performance depends on various operating and design parameters. Regenerator is one of the very important components of the PTC which decides the low temperature that the PTC can attain. Efficiency of regenerator should be high enough, 96% or above, in order to reach very low temperature while the pressure drop in the regenerator is one of the parameters which needs to be analysed in detail. In the present work, theoretical and experimental investigations are carried out on two different single stage U type PTC. The volumes of regenerators and pulse tubes, in both the cases are kept same while the length to diameter (L/D) ratios of regenerators are changed. Investigations are carried out on these PTC with respect to pressure drop in the regenerator and net refrigeration effect obtained from the PTC at 80 K. The pressure drop increases from 0.29 bar to 2.07 bar with an increase in L/D ratio from 1.93 to 9, resulting in decrease in refrigeration effect from 6.1 W to 1.7 W at 80 K with 300 W input power. The study is further extended to understand the effect of coarse size stainless steel mesh size in the regenerator. Coarse size meshes filled up to 60% of regenerator length improved the refrigeration effect from 1.7 W to 2.8 W; however, further filling degrades the performance of the PTC. The experimental results are compared with theoretical results obtained by Sage software and Isothermal model.