A Novel Pre-cooling System for a Cryogenic Pulsating Heat Pipe

To reduce the influence of the pipe material on the measurement of effective thermal conductivity, the pipe of a cryogenic pulsating heat pipe is generally made of stainless steel. Because of the low thermal conductivity of stainless steel, the pre-cooling of the evaporator in cryogenic pulsating heat pipe using helium as working fluid at 4.2 K is a problem. We designed a mechanical-thermal switch between the cryocooler and the evaporator, which was on during the pre-cooling process and off during the test process. By using the pre-cooling system, the cool down time of the cryogenic pulsating heat pipe was reduced significantly.