A Brief Review of Dilution Refrigerator Development for Space Applications

The open-cycle dilution refrigerator (OCDR) has been successfully applied on the Planck mission because it doesn’t need a magnetic field and can continuously provide cooling power. However, the short lifetime and small cooling power have made OCDR unable to meet the increasing requirements of future space missions. The closed-cycle dilution refrigerator currently under study provides a promising method to improve the performances of OCDR. This paper briefly reviews the basic structure and working principle of dilution refrigerators and introduces the development of dilution refrigerators for space applications, especially for Planck missions. Some optimized details of closed-cycle space dilution refrigerators are described, and their advantages and problems are summarized.