Performance Analysis of Portable Heating & Cooling System

Abstract

Air-conditioning and refrigeration play an important role in a variety of fields like food storage, animal husbandry, medicine, and organ transport etc. In applications like transport of medicines, transplant organs etc. there is a huge demand of portable cooling units with inbuilt power supply having automatic temperature and humidity control. Though a lot of cooling mechanisms are available, namely Vapor-absorption, Vortex Tubes, Vapor compression, cooling tubes etc., these find limited application in designing a hand portable system. One reason for this is their vulnerability to large vibrations during transportation. A solid-state electrical cooling system can overcome such deficiencies. The thermoelectric module is a device that works by using the Peltier effect when electrical power supplied on it. In this study, the thermoelectric module is applied as thermoelectric cooler (TEC) using air cooling heat sink where cooling box capacity is 6 L by volume. For this work two TEC 1276 modules with a total maximum power consumption of 100 W were considered. This work experimentally investigates the thermal performance of thermoelectric cooler with a variation on input power and cooling load. A microcontroller base temperature controller was employed to adjust the temperature to the set-point with variations in the thermal load. The investigation was conducted by three variations on input power (10 W, 30 W and 50W) and by two variations of the cooling load using mineral water (1440 mL and 2880 mL) with input power of 50 W. The box temperature achieved at input power 20 W, 30 W and 50.0W are 10.98oC, 6.77 oC and 2.52 oC, respectively. While at the cooling load of 1440 mL and 2880 mL, the temperature achieved in the box are 15.45 oC and 19.32 oC, respectively. The test results showed that in variation on the input power from low to high, the temperature in box becomes lower on high input power and it causes the lower of Coefficient of Performance. This is because more energy could be absorbed on high input power. In the cooling load variation, the greater the cooling load given in cooling box, then the longer the box temperature stability can be achieved because of more energy needed for decreasing the temperature of cooling box.