Design, Fabrication and Heat Transfer Analysis of a Mesoscopic Pulse Tube as an Integrated Micro-Refrigeration System

Abstract

The phenomenon of surface heat pumping has been widely used to accomplish refrigeration in macro-scale devices such as pulse-tubes and thermo-acoustic devices. Pulse tube refrigerators are typically used to lift heat at cryogenic temperatures. The advantage of a pulse tube as a no moving part device makes it amenable to miniaturization at dimensional scales where areal effects, such as friction and viscosity, dominate. In this paper, the design and preliminary fabrication results of such a device to investigate the effect of surface heat pumping in mesoscopic glass channels are presented.