Recently, TECA was honored to have the opportunity to help non-profit with a cooling project. TECA Model AHP-1800XE fills a need for cooling the inside of a free-standing kiosk, thus protecting its electronic components. The kiosk is located in the Veterans Memorial Park in Pensacola, FL where the heat index can reach above 100F. The AHP-1800XE air conditioner has been installed and the customer reports it is functional, easy to install, and quiet.
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.
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.
In this example of an AHP-1200CP application a box surrounds the cold plate area. Materials are set directly upon the cold plate and the lid is closed. The material is cooled and temperature controlled without the large air cooling refrigerator.
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 medical device manufacturer uses a TECA Low-Temperature Cascade System in his design process. The Cascade System consists of a TECA Cold Plate and Cascade attachment. The system offers direct contact cooling to the customer’s load.
In this example, the customer was able to cool his load of Isopropyl Alcohol solution from +25 °C to -25 °C in about 35 minutes. Cooling to such low temperatures allowed the customer to package his very small , invasive medical device.
We received the following feedback from the customer: “I was eventually able to get it down to -38 °C at an ambient temperature of 26 °C. It beats the heck out of the system that is currently being used…This thing is working beautifully. Everyone is most impressed. Thanks!!!”
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.”
As a component in an OEM laboratory chamber, the AHP-150CP condenses out moisture to control humidity. The chamber is primarily used in hospital laboratories. The small size of the AHP-150CP helped reduce the footprint of the chamber and helped increase the work space within the chamber.
The AHP-150CP is maintenance free and the reliability of its thermoelectric cooling technology made our smallest cold plate the perfect OEM solution for this customer.
The AHP-150CP has been replaced by a newer and more efficient model the AHP-250CP series.