This is my idea of building a completely solid-state air conditioner for my shuttlecraft. This isn't a radically new idea. In fact, many companies sell specialized air conditioners that are made from thermoelectric plates (peltiers) just like this. THere is only one problem. Most of these designs expect that you are cooling the inside of a box and therefor you have a heatsink/fan combo on both sides and that is it. Well, I needed to be able to channel the air for my design. I can't just cut a hole in the wall and have a heatsink sticking out the side of the thing, or visible on the inside. So my thought was to take a plastic box and fill it with foam. THen put the heatsinks and T.E. plate inside and cut out channels. This way the air is forced to flow through the heatsinks only. One great benefit, I should be able to reverse the polarity and it will become a heater. I do not know if this is going to work well or not, this is an experiment in progress. Follow my progress to see how I'm making it:
10-12-2005 - (click to enlarge these images) First thing I did was buy a plastic box at The Container Store. Cost = $1.29 Then I cut 4 holes in the sides for the 4 inch pieces of pipe I used.
10-12-2005 - I put plastic packing tape over the ends of the pipes to keep the foam out.
10-12-2005 - Then I filled the box with spray-foam and let it cure.
10-15-2005 - Then I cut out the places and inserted the fans, peltier, and some cardboard pieces to help channel the air better.
The Result? Its a mixed bag. I used a digital thermometor and did several experiments. Here are the results. The ambient air temperature recorded with just the fans running is 74.8 degrees on both output pipes. After turning on power to the thermoelectric plate and waiting several minutes, the hot side reads 120.7 degrees and the cold side reads 69.1 degrees. I used a vacuum cleaner to try to pull more air through the hot side and it did reduce the cold side down to 68.7. It wasn't much, but it did show me that the hot side isn't getting enough airflow. As it works currently, it isn't a very good air conditioner. It works, but not good enough. However, it makes a fine heater. And I will need a heater and it is probably more efficient than using heater coils. So if nothing else, I can use it for that. But I have a new idea for this thing using two CPU water cooling units. It will be a totally different design.