Design and Building of Solar Powered Thermoelectric Refrigerator

Abstract

The continuous and increasing demand for refrigeration in various fields such as air conditioning and food preservation can be costly because of maintenance and harmful for the atmosphere due to the emission of gases such as caused by the production of the refrigerants and refrigeration cycle components.

Thermoelectric cooling is a strong candidate to replace the traditional refrigeration cycles because of its low maintenance and long life, which can reach up to 200,000 working hours; it transforms electrical energy to produce a cooling effect directly without the need of the traditional refrigeration cycle components. This project aims to design, implement and test an automotive thermoelectric refrigerator, controlled remotely via smartphone application. The geometry for the refrigeration chamber were determined to have a volume of 0.4 L with an inner volume of 250 mL, then the total heat load was calculated to be 13.815 W and a TEC 1-12706 Peltier module was selected according to that, while the control system consists of a two microcontroller, two channel relay module, Bluetooth module, two voltage sensor and a temperature sensor to achieve the desired outcomes from the project.