Peltier Issues

March 15th, 2009

Reading back it seems I need to dedicate my entries to some kind of theme… I may start off with some things which are running through my mind at the moment. First off I need to do a bit of study for my Gas assessment next week, I am re-taking my gas safety exam so I can again become CORGI registered (although it’s not Corgi anymore but thats a different subject) the problem is where do I find the necessary material to study? That’s my problem, secondly and more bloggably, I need to donate some of my free time to the design and development of a bit of test kit for the production team at work, this is basically a flat bed made of copper that can be meticulously regulated between -10 degrees and +50 degrees centigrade. My design concepts are quite simple:

This is a Peltier Heat Pump:
Now this device is used prolifically throughout electronic design for cooling power hungry integrated circuits in the form of Processors and power electronics, note I deliberately left out the prefix “micro.” One fantastic property of this device is that it is polarity dependant, meaning one side will heat and the other will cool, but if you reverse the polarity of the supply current, the side that heated now becomes the cold side etc… So i need to cool and heat a plate, the electronics are simple, but I need to study the mathematics to determine the size of heatsink. There are hundreds of pre-manufactured heatsinks available with detailed technical specification, but my method is slightly “out of the box” in so much as I want to cool the plate and “heat” it, which means using ambient heat as the source. I know there is a simple formula to determine the parameters I am working with, but it seems that the ideal solution is difficult to find, on continuing research I believe I will eventually have to develop a bespoke set of maths to deal with this issue.

Entry Filed under: Technical