Two dimensional numerical simulation of tapered pulse tube refrigerator

Two-dimensional numerical simulation of the viscous compressible oscillating flow was carried out for the uniform cross-section and tapered pulse tubes by using a compressible SIMPLEC algorithm code developed by the authors. Effects of the taper angle on the performance of the pulse tube refrigeration were studied. The results showed that there was an optimum taper angle for tapered pulse tube refrigerator. With this optimum taper angle, the refrigerator performance can be improved a lot. But when the taper angle becomes larger than the optimum value, the cooling performance becomes inferior to that of the circular tube. The inherent mechanism of how the tapered pulse tube affects the performance of pulse tube refrigerator was also studied from the view point of second flow distribution in the pulse tube. Compared to the uniform cross-section pulse tube, the values of second flow in tapered pulse tube change a lot and the distribution of second flow becomes uneven as well. This is the main reason that the performance of tapered pulse tube can be improved compared to uniform cross-section pulse tube.