High Efficiency Pulse Tube Cooler

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

“…In some space-based infrared remote sensing systems incorporating LW or VLW IRFPAs, there are strong demands on cooling the optics subsystem at the same time when the IRFPAs are cooled [47,100,101]. The cooled optics contributes to minimize background noise and enhance the detection sensitivity of the detectors.…”

“…For example, by the end of 2013, there were sixteen space SPTCs made by Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems (NGAS) operating in orbit without performance degradation, and two of them had already continuously operating for more than 15 years [20]. All of the above NGAS SPTCs were driven by moving-coil linear compressors [14,20,43,47]. …”

“…The spiral geometric configuration was suggested by the researchers who first put forward the concept of flexure springs for the linear compressors used for cryocoolers [40][41][42], which subsequently had been proven to be qualified for a variety of practical space applications requiring long operation life [43,47]. In the early 1990s, in order to solve the problem of the highly localized stress concentration at both ends of the spiral-arms due to the too small angles between the arms and the clamping edge, Wong et al [58] introduced a novel linear-arm flexure spring.…”

“…The early Oxford-type spiral flexure springs mainly adopted three spiral slots [33,[40][41][42]47]. For a flat disc, three spiral slots usually yield three separate spring arms, and thus it is often called as the three-arm (or three-finger) spiral flexure spring, which is the classical Oxford type and has found a wide range of applications in both space-borne and tactical fields [59,61,63,65,67,69].…”

Performance of a precooled 4 K Stirling type high frequency pulse tube cryocooler with Gd2O2S

“…Pulse tube cryocoolers (PTCs) operate with oscillating pressure and mass flow with no moving parts at the cold end. Compared with a G-M type pulse tube cryocooler (GMPTC) that operates at about 1-2 Hz (Gao and Matsubara, 1994;Wang et al, 1997;Chen et al, 1997), a Stirling type pulse tube cryocooler (SPTC), operating at 30-60 Hz, has a compact structure and light weight, making it very appealing for space and military applications mentioned above (Kotsubo et al, 1998;Radebaugh, 1999;Marquardt and Radebaugh, 2000;Tward et al, 2001;Gan et al, 2008;Yan et al, 2009).…”