Thermoelectric (TE) or Peltier elements use semiconducting materials that can push heat from one side of the unit to the other when power is applied, producing one side hot enough to boil water and the other cold enough to freeze water. Thus, TEs have a variety of potentially useful cooling applications. TEs also do not use harmful chemicals (such as CFCs) and have no moving parts. Here, we investigate a modular TE cooling prototype that could potentially be used for a variety of cooling applications where a typical refrigerator would be undesirable, such as home fermentation, medical storage, or food preservation (i.e. meat curing). Current results indicate the hot side needs to be in direct contact with a heat sink with two fans for efficient dissipation of heat, while a metal spacer placed on the cold side with another heat sink minimizes thermal shorts. We additionally investigate the influence of the thermal conductivity of the metal spacer by testing aluminum and copper parts in our design to determine if the higher thermal conductivity of copper results in improved heat transfer. It was also found that increasing the power of the TE units from 96 W to 154 W improved the cooling ability of the cooling unit. Similarly, employing two cooling units on opposite sides of the enclosure significantly reduced the final temperature within the enclosure. With the current design, it is possible to obtain an air temperature of 1 °C and a water temperature of 4.1 °C in 19 L of water which would be suitable for many of the aforementioned applications.
