Linear adjustable inertance tubes for pulse tube cryocoolers

Inertance tube is coupled with Stirling Pulse Tube Cryocooler because its ability of varying the phase angle of pressure and mass flow thereby could potentially increase the performance of the pulse tube cryocooler. The discrepancy between the theoretically designed inertance tube and the installed one causes tons of work for the researchers to figure out the optimum dimensional parameters matching with the pulse tube cryocooler. This paper offers a substituted method to decrease the complications of determining the best match inertance tube for the specific cryocooler. A linear adjustable inertance tube is proposed to fulfill the requirement. The two section distributed component model with step transition and entrance effect resistance is built to anticipate the phase angle performance of the linear adjustable inertance tube. By a 16% length change, 12° phase angle shift is captured both from the model prediction and the experimental measurement.