Development of Tubes in tube type Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger for Mixed Refrigerant Joule Thomson cryocooler

Abstract

PCHE (Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger) is one of the promising cryogenic compact recuperators for mixed refrigerant Joule Thomson (MR-JT) cryocooler due to its compactness, high NTU and robustness. However, PCHE composed with microchannel bundles can cause flow oscillation along parallel channels, and it can cause the degradation of thermal performance of the system. The geometry inspired from tubes-in-tube heat exchangers is adopted to design a PCHE in this study. This heat exchanger has independent channels for high pressure fluid, but the low pressure channels are hydraulically connected together. The fabricated heat exchanger is tested at cryogenic environment. This paper discusses and experimentally analyses the newly developed PCHE.