Systematic approach to determine the transient cooling power and heat leak of a commercial pulse tube cryocooler

Abstract In a typical pulse tube cryocooler application, modeling the cool-down dynamics of a load attached to the cold tip require knowledge of the transient cooling power. Although this data may be calculated for in-house developed cryocoolers, the only data provided in commercial off-the-shelf cryocoolers is the steady state cooling power. In this paper, we show a systematic approach to derive transient cooling power data by performing heating and cooling experiments. The data obtained is verified with cooling data of an attached mass, which showed a good agreement. We also present a method to determine the parasitic heat load in a steady and transient operation of a commercial pulse tube cryocooler.