Pre-flight thermal performance test of a 35 K cryogenic integrated system

Abstract A cryogenic integrated system, consisting of a neon loop heat pipe, two pulse tube cryocoolers and other components, was designed and tested in the terrestrial environment. This paper presents the test results of the pre-flight thermal performance of the cryogenic integrated system, such as supercritical characteristics, steady-state operating characteristics and critical heat transfer capacity. The integrated system could achieve supercritical startup under auxiliary heat load of 0.4 W and obtain maximum heat transfer capacity of 1.3 W under anti-gravity attitude. The results show that both the function and the thermal performance are in concordance with the expectations, which validates the design of this cryogenic integrated system. Radiator temperature play an important role in the operation of the integrated system, where a temperature increment of 5 °C would lead the supercritical startup to fail.