Peltier Coolers - Can they cool a car? How Efficient Are They?

[yourbadger]

I've stayed up past 4 am watching videos that are years old while being a half hour long with useless content. Finally came across yours and you showed me exactly what information I was looking for

[slopoke]

I started messing around with this tech about 10 years ago and i thought of so many different things to use these for! I still think of trying to use them all the time to this day.

[MrPizzaman]

I think cooling systems are often measured in cooling power / power input. For heat pumps, sometimes this can be 300-500%, or even 3000% if you're pumping heat to a very cold "hot side" like my house's geothermal system when the AC is on. In this case I think your cooling power in 20 minutes was about 15 BTU's. You power input was 85W * 20 min * 60s = 96.7 BTU's. So efficiency would be 15/96.7 or 15.5% average for the first 20 minutes. That value is probably higher for the first few minutes before the conduction through the chip stabilizes with your cooling power.

I have a similar personal interest in playing with Peltier coolers, so every 5 years I pull the 5 of them I have out and try to make some power. I heated and cooled two ~30 lbs aluminum cylinders and placed 4 of the chips in series between the two chunks of metal. The best I could do was 3 or 4 volts, which wasn't enough to even charge a li-ion battery. Maybe someday I'll make a solar concentrator and have the cold side in a running stream to do this again, but it's certainly not easy. In college I made a cooled seat for a Supermileage car. It actually worked pretty good in terms of dropping the water temp be 10-15F while using ~150 watts between the chip and a very powerful 120mm computer fan.

[williamzoom]

I fell down the rabbit hole of these things years back when I discovered the Biolite & needed to know how it worked!

[austinmaxi]

There is a bloke on YouTube by the name of David McLuckie, who has integrated TEGs into a 12v diesel air heater, it produces enough electricity to power the heater's blower fan and fuel pump to run its self, and trickle charge the battery ! Its well worth a look. There's also potential to harvest more power from exhaust heat that's wasted atm.

[Winder-hbcn]

The cooling effect was very limited in your setup because you where dumping all the heat into just a limited amount of water. Try the experiment again and dissipate the hot side to the air in the room. The hot side would stay close to room temperature and the cold side would get much cooler.

[itstrysten]

underrated video and production!
i disagree that your imperial units are convenient in this case. the energy should and could be measured in watts, with parenthetical dispensation for the nostalgic

[thestateofreal]

I tried this in a similar experiment with plans of running distilled water through my heater core (had to pull the AC to fit my go fast parts). I put the heat sinks on the hot side with fans and the cooler on the cold side running water with a small pump. I ran 12v 30amp? from my power supply and what I learned was the hot side has to stay piping hot for you to keep the cold side cold. As soon as the fans kicked on on the hot side, the cold side temps began to rise (so air cooling is a no go). The other challenge is as soon as you cut power, the heat sinks transfer all that heat into your cool fluid very quickly.

[PatClevenger]

I have played with There were really fun back when I used to Overclock CPUs. I am talking like Pentium 2 so old stuff. I bet they be good enough to cool your Speed controllers. Like have them already chilled before you turn them on try thing.

[dylandesmond]

You can use it with antifreeze to cool down an ice box for water to air intercooler. It heats up fast, for daily use it's pointless, but for 1/4 mile you can get some gains

[godzuki]

There are peltier modules meant to produce electricity from heat, those are "significantly" more efficient and barely more expensive than the normal more common ones, also keeping the heat under control is actually pretty easy with chinese pc radiators and fans, just make it at least 240mm and 2x fans per peltier

[GoBrokeOffroad]

Those little controllers are awesome. I used the high amp pwm controller for methanol pulsed injectors on my old diesel. The little gadget projects are cool.

[der_pinguin]

Hey, I did this with my Isuzu I-Mark!

[au]

Would be cool to see these on an intake setup seeing as how they can get sub-ambient. Almost definitely not practical in an actual car, but still really cool

[reed-young]

A more useful device for you might be a thermoelectric generator, which also works on the Peltier principle, but to produce a voltage when the plates are at different temps. So maybe a few of those with their hot sides stuck to the bottom of your muffler and passively cooled with outside air could be wired to some fans, if any of the electronics in your trunk need cooling.

[kcsdy]

I have always had the idea of using a setup similar to supply hot or cold water to a seat cover with a hose running through it. Dissipating the heat when it is cooling the water has always been my biggest issue with the design I have had in my head.

[RollingThunder]

I just commented on doing this your a month ahead of me great scotts if only you had 1.21 jigawatts

[SudipBagbazar]

I am trying to set up a peltier 12706, supplying power from a 12 Volt, 6 Amp transformer rectifying & filtering it into 12 V DC. At first the heat sinks on the hot side is heating up and cold side is cooling respectively. A few minutes later the cold side is also heating up. How to solve this?

[adairjanney]

but can they cool the coolant in the engine like put in the pipe somewhere

[PeterMilanovski]

Re run the exact experiment but lower the voltage to 20V instead....
You should get better performance results running the Peltier device below it's 12V max voltage rating....
Hek! You might even get a better efficiency rating than what you got here!
I have run them at 6V and they worked much better than at 12V... 24V id definitely too high!