Investigation of the thermal mass and heat loads of materials used in the cooled infrared detector package structure

Infrared detectors that detect the radiation emitted by objects in the infrared bant and convert it to meaningful data, are classified as thermal and photon detectors. In contrast to thermal detectors generally working at room temperature, photon detectors need to be cooled to cryogenic levels. Therefore, thermal management of cooled infrared detector packages is critical. In this thesis, the heat load of the cold fingers which are in the cryogenic level cooled infrared detector packages were investigated. The theoretical heat loads of cold fingers are compared with the results of the analysis in a computer-aided simulation. User interface has been developed for the boil-off test to measure cold fingers' heat loads. To investigate the effect of material properties on the heat load, stainless steel 316 (AISI 316) and titanium-grade 5 (Ti-6Al-4V) with the almost same wall thicknesses (⁓ 100 µm and ⁓ 105 µm) were compared. In addition, heat load comparison of two stainless steel 316 cold fingers which have ⁓ 105 µm and ⁓ 185 µm different wall thickness. So, the effect of wall thickness on the heat load was experimentally investigated. The theoretical and experimental data results were compared.