Design Methodology and Experimental Verification of a Novel Orifice Plate Rectifier

Optimizing the rectification and pressure loss controlled by the aperture structure is challenging, with particular attention paid to the problem of precisely modeling the rectification process of multilayer wire mesh in pulse tube cryocoolers. This work offers a rectifier design method based on the regularized orifice plate. A novel rectifier that reduces flow resistance and shows rectification performance comparable to a woven wire mesh is created by analyzing its effects on the flow using numerical simulation. Flow uniformity and pressure loss are selected as evaluation metrics. Point flow velocity calibration is performed under fully developed flow conditions to derive a quantitative equation relating voltage to flow velocity. A multi-cross-section radial flow velocity distribution test platform is set up. The experimental results show that the uniformity of woven wire mesh reaches 0.9670 under low-flow conditions and 0.9629 for the novel eight-ring rectifier, but the pressure drop reduction reaches 57.64%; the uniformity of the novel eight-ring rectifier is improved by 0.91~1.94% compared to that of woven wire mesh under high-flow conditions, and the pressure drop is reduced by 87.74~89.09%. The rectifier features uniformly distributed apertures, facilitating modeling and machining.