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

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

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.

There is a bloke on RU-vid 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.

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.

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

There's a new technology on the horizon called magnetic refrigeration based on the magnetocaloric effect. They can even be solid state, like peltiers, but be as efficient as compressor systems. No refrigerants needed! Fraunhofer is developing the most efficient ones if I remember correctly.

I have played with those!!!!! 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.

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

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.

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

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

Like Your Tech. Thank You For Posting

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

I seem to remember a camping one where you could start a fire in this can thing and they heat from it would slowly charge your sell phone.

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.

Any ideas of how you'd use this concept to cool a small SLA battery?

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

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.

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.

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.

So you need a larger heat sync on the hit side

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

there was a video of a guy that stacked different sized peltier devices to get more efficiency

I've been thinking about using these with an air conditioning condenser and the heater core in a 1982 standard cab pickup that has no AC. Hot side loop would run through the condenser and cold side through the heater core. I'd use some valves to connect switch the heater core between the engine and peltier. I've read that a peltier's best efficiency in heat moved per unit of electricity input is at around 50% of the TEC module's rated power. Google 8 peltier cooler and you'll find many places selling tge same unit with heat sinks in the middle with a fan on one end and a long, blue water block on each side. Most have a crazy cheap price. Buy two to get a second pair of water blocks to sandwich in the center for cold. Put the hot side out with the heat sinks to pull more heat from the outer water blocks. Build a duct to bring air from outside the engine compartment over the heat sinks. Is there a source for the peltiers optimized for converting temperature differential to electricity? A DIY power generator that taps exhaust heat after the catalytic converter could prove some power to run a TEC air cooler. How much exhaust heat from a 350 cubic inch V8 could be converted to electricity?

Hello, Alex. Looking all over the web to find a basic thermoelectric setup (capable of heating and cooling) for a school experiment. Love this video but sadly, I'm not an expert so I have trouble. What is bare minimum needed to conduct this kind of experiment? Thanks.

So basically your butt can help charge your alternator.

There's _way_ more imperial-only use cases. pipe threads, air flow, degrees of angle, air and naval navigation and more. Next your in a plane, ask yourself what height, speed, and what the air around you is doing, and its all in thousands of feet, knots, CFM, PSI, BTU etc. Also, fractions are overpowered if you're not a bonobo. fuck base 10: bases 12, 60, and 360 are way easier to intuit math in sans logarithms.

Cool 😎 🆒️ 😎 for real

Ive been doing a bunch of research on these to make a helmet blower to blow some cooler air than ambient

what was the manufactures temperature delta for the specific peltier you used? also a heat sink on the hot side would make a world of difference

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?

What if water freeze in aluminium water block ? If pump fails

Could a solar panel provide enough power to charge a peltier cooler to cool itself for more efficiency and still provide charge? all solid state charging and cooling? I doubt it, but we will never know unless we connect the red and black wires.

Heat energy is the most hard to get rid of energy and always generated as byproduct and wasting other energy. If there any way to convert heat enery into other energy without generating more heat, until 0 heat left.

I tried this but very inefficient! 12 volts by 10 amp? 1 module. Ieven modified a small thermoelectric fridge.

Can you make a realistic test to make 85-90 degree heat, reach decent temperatures in a car. At least 5 to 10 degrees lower is worth it in my scenario I’m trying to protect my lifepo4, dashcam, interior, etc, from heat. I’m already using ceramic tint and window covers. But heat is still baking my interior.

A lot of useful data and conversions but, after watching countless videos none so far shows how to use the hot side for cooling.

do you use your sigma fp for this shot?

Solar charging ev batteries rewired to 12v to power volute cooled system

I've always thought peltier modules were best as heating elements. The trick is to use water blocks as you are, and steal heat from outside just like some mini splits. All that energy wasted when trying to cool something is just as efficient as a space heater and the heat pumping action is just gravy. You can get as fancy as you like, coupling to a solar oven, swimming pool or any thing else that makes sense.

Gotta use rare metals for.. true usage lol…

They're around 5% efficient