Heat Transfer and Cooling Techniques at Low Temperature

The first part of this chapter gives an introduction to heat transfer and cooling techniques at low temperature. We review the fundamental laws of heat transfer (conduction, convection and radiation) and give useful data specific to cryogenic conditions (thermal contact resistance, total emissivity of materials and heat transfer correlation in forced or boiling flow for example) used in the design of cooling systems. In the second part, we review the main cooling techniques at low temperature, with or without cryogen, from the simplest ones (bath cooling) to the ones involving the use of cryocoolers without forgetting the cooling flow techniques.