Application of field synergy principle to pulse tube refrigerator

In 1998 Guo and his co-workers proposed a novel concept for enhancing convective heat transfer, which is called field synergy principle. According to this principle, the reduction of the intersection angle between the velocity field and the temperature gradient field can effectively enhance convective heat transfer. In recent years there has been a world-wide interest in pulse tube refrigerator, because it has some advantages over other cycles, such as only one moving part at room temperature mechanical simplicity, high reliability, low cost, small magnetic interferences, low mechanical vibrations, and suitability for miniaturization. Several important improvements have been made since the appearance of PTR in 1964. In this paper, the field synergy principle is extended to general transport phenomena and applied to PTR to reveal the essence of these improvements.