Experimental Investigation on Stirling Type Thermally Coupled Three Stage Pulse Tube Cryocoolers with ‘U’ Type Configuration

Research on Stirling type Pulse Tube Cryocooler (PTC) is focused on achieving lower temperatures by cascading the stages or by multi-staging. Multi-staging can be done either by gas coupling or by thermal coupling of the stages. In the thermal coupling option, either a two stage cooler can pre-cool a single stage PTC to reach lower temperatures or a single stage PTC can cool a two stage PTC. In the present work, both these configurations are tested experimentally keeping the same two stage PTC. In case-1, the two stage PTC is used as a pre-cooling stage while in case-2, the single stage PTC is used as a pre-cooling stage. Length of the single stage is required and to be increased to match the two stages PTC for effective thermal coupling in case-1. The lowest temperature achieved in case-1 is 50.07 K where as in case-2 the lowest temperature achieved is 19.61 K at 17 bar charge pressure and 68 Hz frequency. The pressure drop in both the PTCs is compared to analyze the difference in performance.