Air Liquide space cryocooler systems

Development of high performance moving-coil linear compressors for space Stirling-type pulse tube cryocoolers

“…In the aerospace field, both moving-coil [9,[12][13][14][15]18,20] and moving-magnet [10,11,15,16,19,21] designs had been attempted. Especially, for the moving-coil design, it avoids open circuit axial forces and torques on the current carrying coil and it is much easier to completely eliminate the radial forces due to the structural features.…”

“…Therefore, the worldwide space industry has been actively seeking means for multiyear cryogenic cooling in space to enable long-life infrared sensors since the 1950s [4,5]. In the process, two types of regenerative cryocoolers, the Stirling cryocooler and the pulse tube cryocooler (PTC) have been studied in great depth in the past three decades and had a wide range of important practical applications to date [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Especially, the PTC, which eliminates any moving mechanical component at the cold end, has further achieved two evident advantages over the Stirling cryocooler: first, any wear-out at the cold end is eliminated, and second, at the cold end both vibration input and electromagnetic interference (EMI) levels are significantly reduced [23][24][25][26][27].…”

“…Actually, the crux of the problem is that there exists the great difficulty in analytically describing spring stress versus displacement stroke under the conditions that the displacements also exist at axial direction. Therefore, finite element analysis (FEA) modelling has become a necessary approach to understand the mechanism and design optimization of flexure spring [9][10][11][12]15,16,34,[40][41][42][43][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70]. The diameter of a flexure spring plays an important role in determining the stiffness.…”

“…These noticeable features endow the Oxford-type linear compressors with the remarkable merits of high reliability and long life that have a strong appeal to the space field. During the past three decades, the effectiveness of the Oxford-type linear compressor and its various variants has been verified by a variety of space practices and thus achieved acceptance worldwide for driving space Stirling cryocoolers and SPTCs [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22].…”

Modelling of Thermal and Gas-Dynamic Processes in the Porous Structures

“…[1,2] At the same time, emerging tasks can be successfully solved only in case of the intensification of heat transfer processes [3].…”