ATHENS, OH, August 21, 2017 -- Sunpower, Inc., the world leader in free-piston Stirling engine and cryocooler technology, has officially released an Active Vibration Cancellation (AVC) system for its CryoTel® MT, CT, and GT cryocoolers.

The development of the AVC system opens opportunities for Sunpower cryocoolers that were previously unavailable due to the inherent vibration of Stirling machines. The AVC system’s active balancer uses a feedback signal from an accelerometer to cancel the first 10 harmonics of the 60 Hz operation of the cryocooler, minimizing vibration at the cold tip as well as exported vibration to its mounting structure.

CryoTel Cryocoolers with AVC systems have been used for applications that require extremely low vibrations, such as laser cooling, infrared detectors, spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction, atomic microscopy, high-temperature superconductivity, neutron beams, space infrared applications and radio telescopes, among others.

Johns Hopkins University, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and many others have either implemented the AVC system or are developing products that will use it. Several large terrestrial observatories, including the Subaru Telescope and Gemini South Observatory in Hawaii, have AVC-equipped instruments.

The AVC system includes a controller, an active balancer and an accelerometer, as well as the necessary cabling for power and instrumentation. The controller drives both the cryocooler and the active balancer.