Small high cooling power space cooler
- Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems Redondo Beach, Ca, 90278 (United States)
The small High Efficiency pulse tube Cooler (HEC) cooler, that has been produced and flown on a number of space infrared instruments, was originally designed to provide cooling of 10 W @ 95 K. It achieved its goal with >50% margin when limited by the 180 W output ac power of its flight electronics. It has also been produced in 2 stage configurations, typically for simultaneously cooling of focal planes to temperatures as low as 35 K and optics at higher temperatures. The need for even higher cooling power in such a low mass cryocooler is motivated by the advent of large focal plane arrays. With the current availability at NGAS of much larger power cryocooler flight electronics, reliable long term operation in space with much larger cooling powers is now possible with the flight proven 4 kg HEC mechanical cooler. Even though the single stage cooler design can be re-qualified for those larger input powers without design change, we redesigned both the linear and coaxial version passive pulse tube cold heads to re-optimize them for high power cooling at temperatures above 130 K while rejecting heat to 300 K. Small changes to the regenerator packing, the re-optimization of the tuned inertance and no change to the compressor resulted in the increased performance at 150 K. The cooler operating at 290 W input power achieves 35 W@ 150 K corresponding to a specific cooling power at 150 K of 8.25 W/W and a very high specific power of 72.5 W/Kg. At these powers the cooler still maintains large stroke, thermal and current margins. In this paper we will present the measured data and the changes to this flight proven cooler that were made to achieve this increased performance.
- OSTI ID:
- 22263943
- Journal Information:
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1573, Issue 1; Conference: International cryogenic materials conference, Anchorage, AK (United States), 17-21 Jun 2013; Other Information: (c) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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