Modern technology calls increasingly for provision of cooling at cryogenic temperatures: super-conductivity research; imaging equipment for search-and-rescue; contemporary diagnostic medicine (MRI – magnetic resonance imaging); space exploration; advanced computer hardware; military defence systems. Where it is desirable to generate the cooling effect close to the point of heat removal, electrically powered Stirling and pulse-tube machines offer advantages over traditional, passive systems (Leidenfrost and Joule-Thomson). 

Until now there has been no agreed approach to the thermodynamic design of either type. In particular, the choice of regenerator packing has remained a matter for time-consuming – and thus expensive – trial-and-error development. There has been no way of knowing whether an existing ‘fully developed’ unit is performing to the limit of its thermodynamic potential.

Stirling and Pulse-tube Cryo-coolers addresses these problems. 

Features include:

• An ideal cycle for the pulse-tube yielding heat, mass-flow and work;
• Previously unseen phenomena of real gas behaviour;
• Pictorial reliefs of pressure wave interactions;
• Multiple wave reflections in graphic perspective
• First solution of the ‘regenerator problem ‘ by a full, unsteady gas dynamics treatment;
• First ever depiction of pulse-tube boundary-layer events (heat conduction, ‘streaming’) driven by interacting left-and right-running pressure waves
• First analysis of the graded regenerator and optimisation of gas path design;
• Embryonic ‘cook-book’ method of ab initio cooler design based on dynamic similarity and thermodynamic scaling.

Stirling and Pulse-tube Cryo-coolers raises the threshold from which first-principles design of regenerative cryo-coolers may start.  Those wishing to extend their study of the subject beyond the well-trodden, ideal gas/quasi-steady-state rationalisations will require this book.