Active Body Cooling
Here we used our Thermoelectric Coolers (TEC’s) to provide active powered cooling to the human body. One major difficulty in this project was providing a good enough heatsink resistance while being able to be carried by a person. We choose to mimic what the human body already does and provide sweat! Well we skipped the corrosive electrolytes, but used pure water that distributed itself over a wicking structure that saturated the heatsinks. The resulted in more than an order of magnitude better performance out of the same amount of heatsink material. We also built an energy harvesting unit using TEG’s seen below that would charge a local lithium cell to power personal electronics.
Main Roles: Mechanical design of the individual nodes, thermal modeling program, building the prototypes, troubleshooting and testing circuit boards and analyzing test data.
