High-effectiveness miniature cryogenic recuperator

Abstract

The performance of cryogenic refrigerator greatly depends on the effectiveness of heat exchanger, which generates major entropy at low temperature. There are numerous types of heat exchanger available, but it is not easy to apply most of them to cryogenic application because the cryogenic heat exchanger must have high effectiveness value as well as small conduction loss in the environment of considerable temperature difference. In this paper, two kinds of heat exchanger are noticeably introduced for high-effectiveness miniature cryogenic recuperator (recuperative heat exchanger). Also, the flow mal-distribution problem, which is a critical issue of performance deterioration in a high-effectiveness recuperator, is addressed with simplified model, and its alleviation method is discussed.