The customer makes high performance crystal oscillators and atomic clocks for satellites and laboratories and they needed something for temperature control and stabilization.
They found TECA and the AHP-301CPV, tried one and say it is “working fantastic”. Well enough to order more for production, quality and engineering tests. They use them to maintain a stable temperature of the oscillator which in turn provides a stable frequency.
Customer needed to test low-temperature performance of inertial measuring devices. In this application of low temperature thermoelectric cooling; the user is testing inertial measurement devices over a temperature range.
The devices as well as the TECA cascaded cooling assembly are subjected to various rotational and acceleration stimuli while device temperature is controlled. The custom thermoelectric cold plate cascaded (Peltier cascade) was built up from a standard Model AHP-301CP cold plate.
The finished test fixture was able to function with a maximum rotation rate of 1700° per second and 50 g acceleration. The rotation is evident in the photo. By using a standard product as the basis for the cooling system, higher costs associated with a custom solution were avoided.
Some engineers at Lucent wanted to cool devices inside a vacuum chamber and they didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. TECA’s been making devices like that for decades. They had a load of 10 to 20 watts generated and wanted -40 °C with about 15 °C to 20 °C water available.
A Custom LHP-800CP / LHP-300CP cascade, controller and power supply were supplied for a reasonable cost in a reasonable time frame.
A university research team utilized TECA’s AHP-1200C31 Cascaded Cold Plate to build a calorimeter for a research paper that was recently published. The researchers aimed to determine the thermal properties of their specimen as part of a study on cement and concrete durability.
Originally the customer used only the AHP-1200CAS base cold plate and was able to reach -15 °C. When he determined that colder temperatures were needed, he added the CCP-31 cascade attachment to reach -40 °C. With a cascade system each cascade stage acts as a heat sink for the stage above it. This allows the top stage to reach colder temperatures.
TECA offers two and three stage cascade systems for reaching temperatures as low as -60 °C (LHP-1200C31).
Some researchers at Johns Hopkins have taken the AHP-1200CPV thermoelectric cold plate (Peltier cold plate) and are cooling protein crystallization in Teflon trays with a solution in them. They’ve used the remote sense feature by drilling a hole in Teflon tray and installing the sensor in there. Using it with internal sensor and the auto-tuning feature they have gotten the control they needed. The secret may have been in how well the Teflon tray is contacting the 2″ X 3″ plate, machined perfectly flat.
Cooling objects with concave bottoms minimizes the contact area and diminishes the cooling effectiveness.
Keeping medication at optimal storage temperature is very important.
A customized AHP-1200CPV thermoelectric cold plate (Peltier cooling plate) with plate that has grooves with various diameters to accommodate vials of different sizes and lengths was a perfect solution for the customer. Another feature of this custom thermoelectric cooling unit (Peltier cold plate) is tamper proof temperature controller.
Stock thermostated sample tray supplied with mass spectrometer holds water samples at above ambient temperature. This leads to evaporation and condensation within the sample vials, and problems of gas transfer through sample needle to mass spectrometer (liquid condensation blocks gas flow through capillary tube).
USF Geology Stable Isotope Laboratory installed a second auto-sampler with a TECA AHP-1200CPV cold plate to keep samples at precisely controlled temperatures to prevent condensation and evaporation of the sample within the vials, and maintains the thermal stability required for isotope ratio mass spectrometry of water samples analyzed by equilibration method.
A private biopharmaceutical company formulates drugs that are sensitive to temperature. TECA Model AHP-1200 CPV is their perfect benchtop cooling solution. The customer uses the AHP-1200 CPV Cold Plate in combination with the customer’s own aluminum blocks to keep solutions at 0C during filtration and vial filling operations.
The customer reports, “We have been very satisfied”. This customer provided photo is a wonderful example of the versatility of TECA’s line of Laboratory Cold/Hot Plates. The plate surfaces are appropriately sized to accept microtiter plates and other lab accessories. The temperature can be read from either the plate surface or anywhere a remote sensor can be placed, via the Remote Sensibility™ feature.
In March our customer said: “We are most likely going to soon order 1 of the AHP-301CPV.”
First though, can you please provide a quote on the manufacture of a top plate? We would like to fit:
I’d guess that Schott do not make their bottles to too tight specifications, so we would need to allow some room for tolerances. What do you think? These could be arranged in any way that fit best and that minimized any top plate overhang over the cold plate beneath. We can foresee out-growing the 50 mL bottles, so ideally would like the ‘walls’ surrounding the 50 mL wells to be thick enough to later be drilled out so that the wells can accommodate 100 mL Schott bottles (the one I measured was 56mm diameter). The height of the top plate (i.e. depth of the wells) only need be about 70 mm. For the current application, we only need to chill to about 5 deg °C. Does the range we are interested in affect anything?
In May we shipped the custom “Beaker Block: and AHP-301CPV.
Our customer calls the ICE-160 Electric Ice Trays a “dramatic improvement”. He uses several in his medical practice.
From our customer: “We use the ICE-160 during the quality-control and graft-storage portion of our minimally-invasive hair transplant procedures. While hair transplant grafts are outside of the body, they are fragile and susceptible to damage from dehydration and other factors as they are separated from their blood supply. During this delicate phase of the hair transplant, the harvested follicular unit micrografts are now in a special physiologic holding solution at 4 °C using the thermoelectric ICE-160 before and after being counted and sorted and while they are awaiting implantation. This is a dramatic improvement over the use of traditional graft coolers using frozen water which need to be swapped out often during a long NeoGraft FUE hair transplant procedure.
We are confident that this method of graft storage ensures maximum graft viability and helps us maintain exceptional results for our hair transplant patients. The solid metal surface is simple to clean and disinfect after each procedure. Thank you for this great addition to our practice!”