Design and analysis of compact work-recovery phase shifter for pulse tube refrigerator

This paper proposes and describes a compact work-recovery phase shifter of a pulse tube refrigerator. Most pulse tube refrigerators recently developed utilize a long inertance tube and a reservoir for phase control between dynamic pressure and mass flow rate at the cold-end of pulse tube refrigerators. An inertance tube-type phase shifter (long inertance tube and reservoir), however, sometimes creates a problem of compact packaging in cryocooler applications and dissipates the work transferred from a compressor as heat. To overcome this disadvantage, an inertance tube-type phase shifter is replaced with a compact work-recovery phase shifter composed of a mass-spring-damper system and a linear generator in a pulse tube refrigerator. This process is achieved by using analogy of the inertance tube-type phase shifter and the mass-spring-damper system. This paper describes a specific configuration of the designed compact work-recovery phase shifter. Using the simulation code, the performance of the pulse tube refrigerator with the compact work-recovery phase shifter is estimated. As a result, the pulse tube refrigerator with the compact work-recovery phase shifter has the comparable cooling capacity with the pulse tube refrigerator with the inertance tube-type phase shifter. If the recovery work is properly utilized, it can also achieve higher efficiency than that of the pulse tube refrigerator with a typical inertance tube-type phase shifter. In this paper, the parametric study of the mass, the spring and damper coefficients of the compact work-recovery phase shifter has been done and their effects are specifically evaluated. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.