An 80 mW/8 K high-frequency pulse tube refrigerator driven by only one linear compressor

Abstract High-frequency pulse tube refrigerator (HPTR) has significant advantages in terms of compactness and high reliability, but it is difficult to obtain very low cooling temperatures. To obtain temperatures below 10 K, multi-stage structures driven by more than one compressor are currently used. This paper reports a two-stage gas-coupled HPTR driven by a single compressor that is extremely compact and even comparable to a single-stage structure. The pre-cooling temperature influences and gas distribution characteristics, which are two important issues in the research of gas-coupled structure refrigerator, were first numerically calculated and analyzed. Then the calculation results were verified by experiments and the cooling performance was tested. Before gas-coupling with the lower stage, the pre-cooling stage can obtain 4.3 W/40 K cooling capacity with 330 W electric input power, which belongs to a high-efficiency 40 K refrigerator that has been reported so far. With an electric power of 400 W, the gas-coupled HPTR taking the developed 40 K refrigerator as the pre-cooling stage achieves a no-load temperature as low as 5.7 K, which is the lowest record of the current two-stage gas-coupled structure in HPTCs. The developed two-stage HPTR can obtain a cooling capacity as high as 80 mW/8 K, and the two stages can also output the cooling capacity of 100 mW/9.3 K and 1000 mW/40 K simultaneously.