Influence of porosity on the performance of a pulse tube refrigerator: A CFD study

Abstract

This research article illustrates a numerical study of single stage coaxial as well as inline Inertance-Type Pulse Tube Refrigerator (ITPTR), which performance is mostly depending upon a regenerator. Regenerator is the significant component of a pulse tube refrigerator which has a great importance of producing cooling effect. In this present work a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) solution approach has been chosen for numerical purpose. The detail analysis of cool down behaviour, heat transfer at the cold end and pressure variation inside the whole system has been carried out by using the computational fluid dynamic software package FLUENT. A number of cases have been solved by changing the porosity of the regenerator from 0.5 to 0.9 and rest of parameter are remains unchanged. The operating frequency for all case is 34 Hz, pulse tube diameter 5mm and length is 125mm not changed for all cases. The result shows that porosity value of 0.6 produce a better cooling effect on the cold end of pulse tube refrigerator. The variation of pressure inside the pulse tube refrigerator during the process also analysed. To get an optimum parameter experimentally is a very tedious for iterance tube pulse tube refrigerator job so the CFD approach gives a better solution which is the main purpose of the present work. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.