Parameter estimation of equipment for development of an experimental setup of a reverse brayton cryocooler for cooling HTS cables

Reverse Brayton Cryocooler (RBC) can suitably provide continuous cooling to High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) cables used for low-loss power transmission. These HTS cables may impose periodic heat load to the RBCs, which are designed to operate at steady heat load conditions. Performance of RBCs at such conditions needs to be investigated and steps towards mitigation of the effects need to be taken. Building an experimental setup to serve both the purposes is underway at IIT Kharagpur using an existing decommissioned 15 L/hr helium liquefier. It was necessary to know the design and operating parameters of every equipment to reuse them in the setup. However, most of them were unavailable requiring estimation for unknown parameters for equipment like heat exchangers, turbo-expander etc. A parameter estimation method was used for this purpose and dynamic simulations were performed to verify those estimated values of each equipment as presented in the paper.