Plenary 3 Abstract

Ever since the invention of the orifice type pulse tube cooler in the 1980s, the technology has undergone rapid development and several key innovations have taken its performance up to a level comparable to the Stirling cryocooler or GM cryocooler. As more applications have seen the use of pulse tube coolers since the early 2000s, the innovation potential now seems to have come to a plateau.

This paper generalizes some advances of our group in the past decade. On the one hand, a retrospective view of the fundamental thermodynamics and impedance match mechanism may help to deepen our understanding of the related physics. Typical examples are the impedance match between the linear compressor and the cold head and the pulse tube cooler with an ambient rod-less displacer.

On the other hand, research on how to make the system more compact and how to reduce the manufacturing cost, which is strongly related to the practical applications, is also an important part of this paper. Two examples that will be presented are the annular pulse tube and the pulse tube without a flow straightener. Hopefully, this paper and aroused discussions may provide some clues to the further improvement of pulse tube cooler.

The Plenary Speaker:  Wei Dai received his Ph.D. from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2000. Since 2010, he has been working as a full-time professor in Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. With more than 40 published international journal papers, his current research interests mainly include pulse tube cryocoolers, magnetic refrigeration for both room temperature and sub-Kelvin temperature and heat transfer technologies.