Pulse Tube Refrigerator

The pulse tube refrigerator is one of the regenerative cycle refrigerators such as Stirling cycle or Gifford-McMahon cycle which gives the cooling temperature below 150 K down to liquid helium temperature. In 1963, W. E. Gifford invented a simple refrigeration cycle which is composed of compressor, regenerator and simple tube named as pulse tube which gives a similar function of the expander in Stirling or Gifford-McMahon cycle. The thermodynamically performance of this pulse tube refrigerator is inferior to that of other regenerative cycles. In 1984, however, Mikulin and coworkers made a significant advance in pulse tube configuration called as orifice pulse tube. After this, several modifications of the pulse tube hot end configuration have been developed. With those modifications, the thermodynamic performance of the pulse tube refrigerator became the same order to that of Stirling and Gifford-McMahon refrigerator. This article reviews the brief history of the pulse tube refrigerator development in the view point of its thermodynamically efficiency. Simplified theories of the energy flow in the pulse tube have also been described.