Improved Performance of an Indigenous Stirling Type Pulse Tube Cooler and Pressure Wave Generator

Sustained efforts have been made in our laboratory to improve the performance of an indigenously developed pressure wave gen- erator by reducing the mechanical losses and the required input power. An acoustically matching pulse tube cooler, with a design target of 0.5 W at 80 K, was designed using Sage and experience gained from previous studies. The pulse tube cooler was fabri- cated and tested. The effect of regenerator stacking pattern on the cooler performance was studied by filling the regenerator with mesh of the same size #400 and with multi meshes #250, 325, 400. In present experiments, regenerator with #400 mesh at 30 bar filling pressure performed better with more energy efficiency. A no load temperature of 74 K was achieved with input power of 59 W corresponding to a cooling power of 0.22 W at 80 K. Parasitic heat load to the cooler was measured be 0.68 W. This heat load is primarily by heat conduction through the regenerator and pulse tube wall. By reducing the wall thickness from 0.30 mm to 0.15 mm, the parasitic loads can be reduced by 50%.