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 research lab in Europe needed to stabilize the temperature of an acid solution within +-0.5 °C. TECA’s AHP-301CPV Cold/Hot Plate was the ideal solution due to its small footprint, versatile features and programmable temperature controller. The customer offered the following comments:
TECA’s cold/hot plates are not specifically designed for clean room use however the customer determined this product would be suitable given the restrictions in this particular clean room.
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.
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.
An aerospace contractor was interested in a large cold plate for the testing of electronic components. We first offered them the AHP-1200CPV but they responded that the AHP-1200DCP was more the size they wanted. Could we change it to a single plate? Well, we couldn’t change the plate size but we could add an accessory plate which was larger. And we could build the unit with one controller including all of the standard options.
Now they are using the 12” x 18” custom accessory plate and a special AHP-1200DCP to test electronic amplifiers by ramping the temperature up and down between +10 °C to +70 °C. A custom solution at very nearly standard product price to fill a not so unusual need.
A university-based agriculture research laboratory in Spain is measuring plant metabolism under various conditions. TECA Corporation’s high-capacity version of the AHP-1200CPV (please refer to part number 9-35KB-1-0A0 on our product specification sheet) is used to cool the plant to 22 °C. Precise temperature control is important in this application as the plant’s roots must not get too cold.
There is a significant heat load to deal with as well: the plant is being illuminated with LED lights. Finally, thermal contact is an issue. The plant is inside a glass container, which is inside an aluminum block, which is placed on the AHP-1200CPV Cold Plate surface. Working closely with TECA engineers, the customer was successfully able to integrate the AHP-1200CPV Cold Plate into this unique experiment design and his sensitive thermal management needs were met.
The customer shared with us: “Your suggestion to add water between the glass and the aluminum block is a good one. It does lower the temperature inside, probably by increasing the thermal contact. The fit between the block and the glass is pretty tight. The glass was made first and then the block was drilled out using the glass as a reference. Still, even a tiny space basically ruins the heat transfer, so adding the water seems to fix that. Thanks for your help and suggestions, they were quite useful.”
A materials scientist at a state university used TECA’s AHP-1200CPV to conduct published research. The researchers built a thermal fatigue chamber using the AHP-1200CPV.
A 2mm-thick specimen was sandwiched between two laboratory-built hot plates. The hot temperatures were as high as 400 °C. The AHP-1200CPV cold plate cooled the researchers’ load to 30 °C. Our customer reports that he was able to maintain the 30 °C temperature within +/- 2 °C.
A university research laboratory uses TECA’s AHP-1200CPV Cascade system to perform nucleation studies. The AHP-1200CPV Thermoelectric Cold/Hot Plate paired with a CCP-31 Cascade attachment creates a low-temperature cooling system. The customer is able to control the temperature of an aluminum dish, rapidly cycling between +20 °C to -45 °C.
The Plexiglas box on top is to contain a dry nitrogen flow, which prevents condensation and frost from forming on the experiment stage.