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Investigation on High-power Stirling-type Pulse Tube Coolers for Cooling HTS Motors
Daming Sun, Marc Dietrich, and Guenter Thummes
AbstractHigh-power Stirling-type pulse tube coolers (HSPTCs) driven by oil-free linear compressors are promising candidates for cooling HTS devices for the advantages of simple configuration, low noise and stable operation. Three U-shaped two-stage pulse tube coolers driven by a 10 kW linear compressor were built and studied. The effects of flow inhomogeneity on the temperature profiles along the regenerator and on the cooling capacity were investigated experimentally. By optimizing the impedance matching and operating conditions, the first cooler can reach a base temperature of 44.2 K; the second cooler reaches a base temperature of 27.1 K and provides a cooling power of 50 W at 45.6 K with 4.8 kW of pV power; the last cold head reaches a base temperature of 13.27 K and provides a cooling power of 18.3 W at 30 K. The present results form a foundation for building a HSPTC system capable of providing a cooling power of 80 W at 30 K. Index Termscryocooler, pulse tube, superconductivity.

I. INTRODUCTION

ryogenic refrigeration systems are indispensable for superconducting applications [1]. Recently, urgent demands have been made on efficient, reliable, and low-noise refrigerators with high cooling capacity for cooling HTS devices, such as generators, motors, and energy storage systems, which can only be partially fulfilled by conventional refrigerators. High-power or large-scale HTS applications require that the cooler provide hundreds of watts of cooling power below 80 K. However, nowadays many HTS devices need to work in a cryogenic environment at even lower temperatures, such as 30 K for HTS BSCCO motors. Compared with other regenerative cryocoolers, such as Gifford-McMahon (GM)- and Stirling-type coolers, the pulse tube cooler (PTC) has several advantages due to the absence of mechanical moving parts in its cold section, which results in high reliability and long lifetime associated with reduced
Manuscript received 12 September 2011. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Contract No. 50806064, the funding for selected project of returned personnel of Zhejiang province under Contract No. 20100129, and by the German Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) under Grant No. 03SX221A. Daming Sun is with the Institute of Refrigeration and Cryogenics of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China (phone: 86-571-87952769; fax: 86-571-87953195; email: sundaming@zju.edu.cn). He was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Applied Physics of Giessen University and TransMIT-Center for Adaptive Cryotechnology and Sensors from April 2007 to August 2008. Marc Dietrich and Guenter Thummes are with the Institute of Applied Physics of Giessen University and the TransMIT-Center for Adaptive Cryotechnology and Sensors, Germany (email: marc.dietrich@ap.physik.uni-g iessen.de; guenter.thummes@ap.physik.uni-giessen.de).

vibration level and manufacturing cost. There are two main types of PTCs: (i) the GM-type PTC that uses an oil-lubricated valved helium compressor for operation and (ii) the Stirling-type PTC that is normally driven by a valveless dry compressor. The Stirling-type PTC has the potential to meet all of the aforementioned requirements, while the use of the GM-type PTC is rather restricted because of its need for maintenance of the compressor and the possibility of contamination of the working gas by compressor oil [2]. Recently, more and more attention has been focused on high-power Stirling-type PTCs (HSPTCs). Several prototypes exhibit efficiencies higher than 10% at liquid nitrogen temperature [3]-[6]. However, all these HSPTCs are of single-stage and linear-configuration, and none of them was able to reach a refrigeration temperature below 30 K. There are two main reasons for this. The first one is that some of the PTCs are optimized for high cooling power at about 80 K. Secondly, extending PTCs to high cooling capacity is not a simple matter of scaling up the existing small-size PTCs. There are several stubborn problems only related to HSPTCs, such as flow distribution, internal regenerator streaming, and efficient heat exchanger design and manufacture. To avoid problems of flow distribution and dead volume, most HSPTCs reported till now adopt a linear-configuration, which makes the coupling with the thermal load rather inconvenient. At Giessen University, the research on HSPTC started with a large-scale single-stage PTC, in which a serious azimuthal temperature inhomogeneity was found. By enhancing the transverse heat conduction in the screen-type regenerator, the cooler reached 34.6 K and provided cooling powers of 50 W at 45 K and 100 W at 56 K at an electric input power of 6.3 kW [7]. In order to reach lower refrigeration temperature and to realize a more convenient coupling with the thermal load, three U-shaped two-stage HSPTCs were designed, manufactured and experimentally investigated. Two of them are of large scale and have nearly identical structures except the layout of the cold end heat exchangers. The third one is a medium-scale Stirling-type PTC aimed for a parallel arrangement of several cold heads to reach a high cooling capacity below 30 K. The main configurations and some important experimental results of these three two-stage PTCs are presented in this paper. II. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND MEASUREMENT SYSTEM A Stirling-type PTC consists of a linear compressor and a pulse tube cold head. The cold head is generally composed of an aftercooler, a regenerator, a cold end heat exchanger, a pulse tube, a hot end heat exchanger, and a phase shifter. For most

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4HO1-1 Stirling-type PTCs, the combination of inertance tube and reservoir is appropriate for phase shifting. A double inlet valve (DIV) is helpful to reach refrigeration temperature below 30 K [8]. The three cold heads are all driven by a dual-piston linear compressor (QDrive model 42SM-2S297W), which is equipped with two position sensors and a pressure sensor to measure the generated acoustic power, also referred to as pV power. The refrigeration temperature TC2 is measured at the cold end heat exchanger of the second stage by means of a calibrated Cernox resistance thermometer. The refrigeration temperature TC1 of the first stage is measured by a Pt-100 resistance thermometer. In order to identify any internal streaming in the regenerator, a few Pt-100 thermometers are distributed along the regenerators and pulse tubes. The schematic diagram of a large-scale two-stage HSPTC was shown in [2], [8], however the structure of the second stage was not presented in detail. Fig. 1 shows the configuration of the second stages of these two HSPTCs with regenerator diameter of 77 mm. They have a nearly identical structure except the cold end heat exchangers. A slit-type heat exchanger is used to connect the cold ends of pulse tube and regenerator in version A, while version B adopts a screen-type cold end heat exchanger in combination with a tube to connect the cold ends. Fig. 2 shows the schematic of the second-stage regenerator and the locations of the temperature sensors.

2 Fig. 3 shows the schematic of the medium-scale two-stage Stirling-type PTC. The diameters of the first and second stage regenerators are 77 mm and 46 mm respectively. Different from the two large-scale HSPTCs, the cold head uses gas coupling to realize the inter-stage distribution of mass flow and energy flow [9]. To optimize the impedance coupling between the cold head and compressor, a quarter-wavelength transfer line is used, while the two large-scale coolers employ a much shorter transfer line of about 1.0 m.

Fig. 3. Schematic of the medium-scale two-stage Stirling-type PTC. TREG0.25A, TREG0.25B, TREG0. 5A, TREG0.5B, TREG0. 75A, and TREG0.75B show the locations of the Pt-100 temperature sensors along the first and second stage regenerators. TPT1_0.5A and TPT1_0.5B show the Pt-100 sensors at the middle of the first stage pulse tube, and TPT2_0.5 indicates the Pt-100 sensor at the middle of the second stage pulse tube. PREG, PPT1, and PPT2 denote the locations of pressure sensors.

III. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS A. Large-Scale U-shaped Two-stage Stirling-Type PTCs In cooler version A a serious streaming was found in the second-stage regenerator. Firstly, the two stages were operated separately and there was no flow distributor set above the second stage slit-type cold end heat exchanger. As shown in Fig. 4, the lowest refrigeration temperature of the second stage was about 74.1 K, which is much higher than the base temperature of 32 K predicted by a one-dimensional model based on Sage software [7], [8]. It is seen from Fig. 4 that the temperature TREG0.25B is higher than TRHX and TREG0.25C is even lower than TC2, which indicates a large azimuthal temperature inhomogeneity and an abnormal axial temperature distribution occurring in the second stage regenerator. The maximum circumference temperature difference between TREG0.25B and TREG0.25C was in the range from 46.1 K to 50.3 K, which didnt change much when the pV power was varied. After measures were taken to suppress the jet flow from the slit-type cold end heat exchanger, the second stage reached a no load refrigeration temperature of 48.2 K. Then the two stages were thermally coupled by a copper bridge. As shown in Fig. 5, the lowest no load temperature of 44.2 K was obtained when the pV power is 3.83 kW. The cooler can supply a cooling power of 150 W at 80 K.

Fig. 1. Schematics of the second stages of these two HSPTCs. AC, REG, RHX, CHX, PT, and HHX denote aftercooler, regenerator, middle heat exchanger, cold end heat exchanger, pulse tube, and hot end heat exchanger, respectively.

Fig. 2. Schematic of the second-stage regenerator for version A and B. TRHX1, TRHX2, TREG0.25A, TREG0.25B, TREG0.25C, TREG0.25D, TREG0.75A, TREG0.75B, TREG0.75C, and TREG0.75D show the locations of Pt-100 temperature sensors.

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4HO1-1

3 cooler reaches 27.1 K. Based on the pV power, the relative Carnot efficiency is 11% at 57 K. However, the available pV power is limited when the working frequency is decreased, which limits the potential of cold head version B.

Fig. 4. Refrigeration temperature and radial temperature distribution at the lower part of the second stage regenerator of cooler version A vs pV power.

Fig. 6. Cool-down curves of cooler Version B.

Fig. 5. Load curves of cooler version A.

The above experience with cooler version A clearly shows that flow straightening at the cold end heat exchanger plays a crucial role in HSPTCs. Evidently, the curved flow channels of the slit-type cold end heat exchanger resulted in an intrinsic jet flow. This led us to the design, manufacturing and testing of the HSPTC version B. As shown in Fig. 6 the lower part of the regenerator of version B exhibits good temperature homogeneity during most of the cool-down process. When TC2 reaches about 80 K a temperature inhomogeneity arises. The temperature curves of TREG0.25B and TREG0.25C even intersect when TC2 is below 40 K. Both of these two phenomena indicate that the temperature inhomogeneity is strongly related to refrigeration temperature and only has a weak relation to jet flow, which is quite different from version A. In order to find a way to decrease the refrigeration temperature further, the cold head was driven at lower frequencies. As the compressor is designed and optimized at 60 Hz, it is difficult to get high efficiency at low frequency. To make the compressor work more resonantly, the working pressure is reduced to about 15 bar. Fig. 7 shows the effects of operating frequency and working pressure on the refrigeration temperature of the second stage at different pV powers. As shown in Fig. 7, it is beneficial to increase the working pressure and to decrease the working frequency to obtain a lower TC2. With working frequency and pressure of 40 Hz and 15.2 bar, respectively, the lowest refrigeration temperature is 29.5 K without double-inlet. When a double-inlet is introduced, the

Fig. 7. Effect of working frequency and working pressure on the base temperature of cooler version B.

B. Medium-scale U-shaped Two-stage Stirling-type PTC A medium-scale U-shaped two-stage Stirling-type PTC was designed and manufactured taking into account the above considerations. As shown in Fig. 3, the cooler is characterized by a gas-coupled inter-stage configuration and a quarterwavelength transfer line between the cooler and compressor. The cold end heat exchanger of the second stage is of copper screen-type. The medium-scale cold head is operated at 40 Hz. Fig. 8 shows the temperature distribution along the regenerator of the PTC. The azimuthal temperature difference is largest at the upper part of the regenerator and the maximum temperature difference is 20.3 K. The azimuthal temperature difference is small at the lower part of the regenrator taking into account some deviation in the alignment of the sensors. The second-stage regenerator is completely filled with lead spheres with an average diameter of 100 m. The cooler shows a large pressure drop [9] and a distinct axial temperature distribution along the regenerator, as shown in Fig. 9. The largest temperature gradient occurs in the upper part of the regenerator that is filled with stainless steel screens. When a thermal load is applied to the second stage, the temperature profile along the upper part of the regenerator nearly remains constant, whereas the temperatures along the lower part increase gradually.

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4HO1-1 Fig. 10 shows the cool-down curve of the medium-scale PTC. As shown, the first stage temperature TC1 decreases rapidly, reaches a lowest temperature of about 73 K, and then rises to about 80 K, while the second stage temperature TC2 keeps decreasing until a stable point is reached. By improving the flow straightening, the cooler reaches a no load refrigeration temperature of 13.27 K with a pV power of 3.85 kW. As shown by the load curve in Fig. 11, the cooler is able to provide a cooling power of 13.2 W at 25 K and a cooling power of 18.3 W at 30 K.

Fig. 11. Load curve of the medium-scale PTC.

IV. CONCLUSION The present development of high-power two-stage Stirling-type PTCs with U-shaped configuration clearly show the complex problems with flow distribution, internal regenerator streaming, and heat exchanger design. For these reasons, the two larger cold heads A and B reached only no load temperatures of 44.2 K and 27.1 K. These problems with flow distribution and streaming can be avoided or at least reduced, when the PTC cold head is reduced in size, as with the third investigated PTC cold head. This last PTC achieves a no load temperature of 13.27 K and a cooling power of 18.3 W at 30 K. This research has laid the foundation for future realization of a HSPTC system capable of providing 80 W cooling power at 30 K.

Fig. 8. Temperature distribution along the regenerator of the medium-scale PTC vs thermal load.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT D. M. Sun thanks Prof. Guenter Thummes for the invitation to his working group and for helpful instructions. REFERENCES
[1] H. Hirai, Y. Suzuki, M. Hirokawa, et al., Development of a turbine cryocooler for high temperature superconductor applications, Physica C, vol. 469, pp. 18571861, 2009. D. M. Sun, W. Chao, J. C. Sun, L. M. Qiu, Advances in High Power Stirling-type Pulse Tube Cooler, IEEE Trans. on Applied Superconductivity, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 2043-2046, June 2010. Zia J H, A Pulse Tube Cryocooler with 300W Refrigeration at 80K with Operating Efficiency of 19% Carnot, in Proc. 14th International Cryocooler Conference, vol. 14, pp. 141-147, 2007. S. A. Potratz, T. D. Abbott, M. C. Johnson, et al, Stirling-type Pulse Tube Cryocooler with 1kW of Refrigeration at 77K. Advances in Cryogenic Engineering, vol. 53, pp. 4248, 2009. E. Ercolani, J. M. Poncet, I. Charles, et al, Design and prototyping of a large capacity high frequency pulse tube, Cryogenics, vol. 48, no. 9-10, pp. 439-447, 2008. J. Imura, S. Shinoki, T. Sato, Development of high capacity Stirling type pulse tube cryocooler, Physica C, vol. 463465, pp. 13691371, 2007. M. Dietrich, L. W. Yang, G. Thummes, High-power Stirling-type pulse tube cryocooler: Observation and reduction of regenerator temperature inhomogeneities, Cryogenics, vol. 47, pp. 306-314, 2007. D. M. Sun, M. Dietrich, G. Thummes, High-power Stirling-type pulse tube cooler working below 30 K, Cryogenics, vol. 49, pp. 457-462, 2009. M. Dietrich and G. Thummes, Two-stage high frequency pulse tube cooler for refrigeration at 25 K, Cryogenics, vol. 50, pp. 281286, 2010.

Fig. 9. Axial temperature distribution along the regenerator of the medium-scale PTC for different thermal loads.

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[6] [7]

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[9] Fig. 10. Cool-down curve of the medium-scale PTC.

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