2021 Capstone Group 20

       As we prepared to continue work on our project, the Greater Houston area was threatened by Hurricane Nicholas of Category 1, which resulted in the school closing Sept. 13-14 due to possible flooding and strong winds. This natural event delayed when our team would meet by a couple of days and resulted in a shorter limited time for once we met again on Wednesday, Sept. 15. We began to set up our system, now integrating the water-cooling loop to cool down the Peltier devices and as we were ready to begin testing and gather data, we noticed the water pump for the water-cooling loop was no longer operational and we weren’t able to test our system that day. Once we got our hands on a new water pump, we began to run tests on multiple configurations and gather data so we can catch-up for the days lost and compare the two designs to each other. The first test, shown in Figure 1, was a basic model of our original system design using a heat sink and fan. We collected tem...

Thus far, our team has purchased 90% of the materials needed for the project in its entirety, but has enough materials on-hand to start testing our Temperature Control System. The team has performed preliminary testing of various set-ups of the system. Preliminary testing was necessary to develop our final system design. We have tested the Peltier devices individually at 5V and 12V. We tested various combinations of multiple Peltiers at different voltage levels. We combined the Peltier with heat sinks, thermal paste, and fans in different orientations to develop an understanding for how they affect the performance of the Peltier. We added the waterblock and pump to the system to test the temperature control capability to affect the water. Peltiers performance is heavily affected by the ability to remove the heat it produces. From testing we found the effectiveness of the Peltiers can be improved by increasing the heat sink size, increasing the airflow across the heat sink and Peltier u...