Development of parallel wire regenerator for cryocoolers

This paper describes development of a novel regenerator geometry for cryocoolers. Parallel wire type is a wire bundle stacked in parallel with the flow in the housing, which is similar to a conventional parallel plate or tube. Simple and unique fabrication procedure is developed and fully depicted in this paper. Hydrodynamic and thermal experiments are performed to demonstrate the feasibility of the parallel wire regenerator. First, pressure drop characteristic of the parallel wire regenerator is compared to that of the screen mesh regenerator. Experimental result shows that the steady flow friction factor of the parallel wire type is three to five times smaller than that of the screen mesh type. Second, thermal ineffectiveness is determined by measuring the instantaneous pressure, the flow rate and the gas temperature at the warm and cold ends of the regenerator. The measured ineffectiveness of the parallel wire regenerator is larger than that of the screen regenerator due to the excessive axial conduction loss. To alleviate the intrinsic axial conduction loss of the parallel wire regenerator, segmentation is introduced and the experimental results reveal the favorable effect of the segmentation. Entropy generation calculation is adopted to compare the total losses between the screen regenerator and the parallel wire regenerator for various operating ranges. Simulation results show that the parallel wire regenerator can be an attractive candidate to improve cryocooler performance especially for the case of smaller NTU and lower cold-end temperature.