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Applied Thermal Engineering 27 (2007) 2841–2849

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Development of a temperature-controlled car-seat system


utilizing thermoelectric device
Hyeung-Sik Choi *, Sangkook Yun, Kwang-il Whang
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Maritime University, Dongsam-Dong Yeongdo-Ku, Pusan, Republic of Korea

Received 19 February 2006; accepted 9 September 2006


Available online 10 May 2007

Abstract

A thermoelectric device was used to control the temperature of the car-seat surface: the warm temperature in the summer and cold
temperature in the winter. The characteristics of the thermoelectric device for the car-seat were analyzed in relation to the input voltage
and output temperature of the device. To install the device inside the car-seat, an air conditioning system was designed, consisting of a
fan and duct to regulate the warm side of the thermoelectric device. To analyze and control the temperature of the car-seat system, a
mathematical model of the car-seat system is proposed, and a robust control algorithm based on the sliding mode control is applied,
respectively. A portable control system implementing the sliding mode control algorithm was developed by using a one-chip micropro-
cessor and power driving system. The good performance of the developed control system for the constructed car-seat system was vali-
dated by actual tests. The test results are presented.
 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Thermoelectric device; Sliding mode control; Temperature control; Car-seat

1. Introduction other in the direction of the applied voltage. The low or


high temperature of the device can be used to realize a
Nowadays, people spend a lot of time in the car, so a cooler in the summer a heater in the winter. The tempera-
comfortable environment has become very important. ture difference that occurs on both sides of the device
The interior temperature of the car is one of the most according to the applied electric power is called the Peltier
important factors that influence the car’s comfortable envi- phenomenon. After discovery of the phenomenon, exten-
ronment. When we first take a seat in the car in the hot sive applications have been studied. The basic property of
summer and in the cold winter, we are displeased by the the semiconductor material and heat electromotive force
hotness or coldness of the car-seat. Human bodies are very was studied [1], as well as the cooling effect of the thermo-
sensitive to the temperature of the seat. To prevent the cold electric device. The device has been successfully applied to
temperature of the seat, a heating system using electric food refrigerators and air conditioning, and several appli-
wires has been used in the car-seat, but a cooling system cations where the facility to vary the cooling capacity of
in the car-seat has been rarely used. The most desirable the device to match the particular application has proved
car-seat would be that which can provide warmth and cool- an important factor [2]. Furthermore, the temperature con-
ness in response to changes in surrounding. trol of a refrigerator using thermoelectric liquid cooler was
Both sides of an electronic device have different temper- studied [3], and the measurement of the surface heat flux of
atures, and they can exchange their temperature with each a constructed physical model using the reversible Peltier
effect was studied where it was found capable of measuring
heat flux with an 1% error [4]. For application in the indus-
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 51 410 4297; fax: +82 51 405 4790. try, significant advances have been made in the miniaturi-
E-mail address: hchoi@mail.hhu.ac.kr (H.-S. Choi). zation of the detectors and sensors of thermoelectric

1359-4311/$ - see front matter  2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2006.09.004
2842 H.-S. Choi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 27 (2007) 2841–2849

Nomenclature

I current through the thermoelectric module (Å) Th hot-end temperature of the thermoelectric mod-
Kt total thermal conductivity of thermoelectric ule (K) [C for Eqs. (8) and (10)]
module, (W C1) TL cold side temperature of the thermoelectric de-
QL absorbed heat at cold device (W) vice (K) [C for Eqs. (8) and (10)]
R total electrical resistance of thermoelectric mod- V voltage to the thermoelectric module (V)
ule (X) a seeback coefficient of thermoelectric module
RF thermal resistance of heat sink (C W1) (V C1)
RFopt thermal resistance of heat sink at the condition DT Th  TL
of optimum COP (C W1) T Ld the desired cold temperature
Ta ambient temperature (C) K sliding control gain

devices [5,6], and due to the modularity and reliability of seat system is presented. An air conditioning system com-
the thermoelectric device substituting for the conventional posed of an air duct and heat sink was designed to regulate
large-scale Freon system, application study to naval sub- the higher temperature on the reverse side during cooling.
marine was successfully performed [7]. Nowadays, a system The robust temperature control using the sliding mode
design method of the thermoelectric cooler was proposed control is proposed under uncertain environments and
[8] where two optimal design approaches were studied for parameter uncertainties of the car-seat system. The control
the maximum value of the optimal cooling capacity and scheme was implemented by using a one-chip microproces-
best heat sink technology. sor, and the superior performance of device validated by
For practical application, a research on the development experiments.
of a waterless container for transporting live fishes utilizing
thermoelectric devices was performed where the fishes were 2. The characteristics and performance of thermoelectric
alive for 21 h [9]. Thorough research results on the compar- device
ison of the air-conditioners based on the thermoelectric
device with other conventional air-conditioners based on 2.1. The principle and characteristics of thermoelectric device
vapor compression and absorption were performed where
the air-conditioners based on the thermoelectric device The thermoelectric device is made from non-stoichiom-
showed better performance in environmental friendliness, etric Bismuth Telluride (Bi2Te3) semiconductors which
reliability, and operational life compared despite of high consist of the negative type (N-type) semiconductor result-
cost due to its low COP and production initialization ing from the small excess of telluride having more electrons
[10,11]. Besides these, many other researchers investigated and the positive type (P-type) one due to the small telluride
the thermoelectric properties, modules for cooling applica- deficiency having more holes. The thermoelectric device
tion, and general applications of the device itself. induces the Peltier phenomenon, in which heat is absorbed
However, not many researches have been performed on on one side of the device and emitted on the other side
the control of the thermoelectric device. As a research to when electric power is applied to the device. By applying
study the temperature control of the device, the control electric power to the arranged N- and P-type semiconduc-
on the precision heat actuator heat using the thermoelectric tors as shown in Fig. 1, the electrons move from the low
device was studied where compensation of the position level energy P-type semiconductor to the high level energy
error by 5 lm was achieved [12]. For he temperature con- N-type semiconductor. Consequently, heat is absorbed by
trol of thermoelectric cooler, A linear dynamic model the cool side, and the electrons move to the P-type semi-
including the heat sink and cooling-load heat exchange conductor, and then heat is emitted from the warm side.
was derived using small-signal linearlization method where Heat pumping performance is proportional to the amount
test results show the cold-end temperature can be main- of flow of electric power and the number of pairs of the
tained at the fixed value within ±0.1 C irrespective of semiconductors. The absorbing or emitting sides of the
the variations of the cooling load and the ambient condi- device are exchanged by the direction of the electric cur-
tions [13]. rent. Also, the amount of the absorbed and emitted heat
This paper is concerned with the temperature control of depends on the Peltier coefficients and the intensity of the
the thermoelectric device, which is to be used to cool and electric power. However, the over-power supplied to the
warm car. The characteristics and performance of the ther- device does not increase the amount of the absorbed heat
moelectric device were analyzed; the control of the temper- due to heat conduction. Conversely, excessive power sup-
ature on the reverse side of the thermoelectric device is ply over the specified maximum currents of the device
described; and lastly, a mathematical modeling for the can cause negative cooling effect on the other side of the
warm and cool temperature control of the designed car- device such that power control is important.
H.-S. Choi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 27 (2007) 2841–2849 2843

Fig. 1. Principle of thermoelectric device.

2.2. The characteristics curve and the performance test


of thermoelectric device

To construct the warm and cool temperature control


system for the car seat, the typical thermoelectric device,
HM3930 made by Acetec company in Korea, was selected
and its characteristics were analyzed by performance tests.
The specification of HM3930 is shown Table 1, and the
temperature curves according to various voltages and cur-
rents are shown in Fig. 2. According to the characteristic
graphs in Fig. 2, the temperatures of the warm side (Th)
and the cool side (Tc) increase with the increase of the
applied voltage and currents.
The temperature of the one side of the device varies
according to the temperature variation of the other side,
applied voltage, and currents. For this reason, to achieve
a desired temperature on one side of the device, the temper-
ature of the other side, supply voltage, and currents should
be controlled. In order to apply the device to the tempera-
ture control of the car-seat, these three variables should be
known. In a car, the battery voltage is 12 V, which is higher
than the appropriate voltage for the M3920. Therefore, per-
Fig. 2. HM3930 characteristics graph.
formance of the device according to the variation of the sup-
ply voltages should be tested, and the temperature of the
other side of the device must be regulated. The temperature application to a car-seat with small inside space. We mea-
can be regulated by the air conditioning system using an air sured the temperature of the cool side and warm side at the
fan and heat sink. The results of the performance tests of the indoor temperature (25 C) by applying regular 6 V and
device provided information on the design specification of 12 V DC to the thermoelectric device. The electronic chip
the temperature control of the car-seat. LM35 from National Semiconductor Inc. was used as the
For the performance test on the thermoelectric device, temperature measurement sensor, whose characteristics
HM3930, we used two different voltages and an appropri- are shown in Table 2. The sensor was placed between the
ate air fan capacity and the heat sink size by considering its heat sink and the device to measure the temperature of

Table 1
Specification of thermoelectric device HM3930
Part number Description
No. HM no. Imax (A) Tmax (C) Vmax (V) Qmax (W) Size (mm) (L * W * H) Weight (g)
7 HM3930 3.9 69 8.4 16.7 30 * 30 * 4.7 15.1
2844 H.-S. Choi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 27 (2007) 2841–2849

Table 2
Feature of LM25
Scale factor Accuracy Operation range Operation voltage Impedance output
Linear +10.0 mV/C 0.5 C (at + 25C) 55 C + 150 C 4–30 V 0.1 X for 1 mA load

Fig. 3. Thermoelectric device with the fan and heat sink.

the warm side accurately. The capacity of the air fan was
2 W, and regular 12 V was applied. Fig. 4(b). Test of thermoelectric device.
Fig. 3 shows the thermoelectric device HM3930 placed
on the heat sink with the cooling fan to control the temper-
ature of the warm side of the device. The size of the heat over-power, the temperature difference was about 45 C,
sink was 38 mm · 38 mm in width and 10 mm in height. which is kept steady. The temperature of the cool side was
The performance of the device was tested under the maintained around 2 C at applied voltage of 6 V to the
described air conditioning environment, and tests were per- device, as shown in Fig. 4(b), which shows the similar char-
formed for three minutes and the test results are shown in acteristics of the HM3939 as those shown in Fig. 2(b).
Fig. 4. Fig. 4(a) shows the temperature variation of the cool According to the test results, to achieve good tempera-
and the warm side under the temperature regulation of the ture control of the car-seat, two important constraints
warm side using the heat sink and air fan at applied input should be considered. One is the size of the air conditioning
voltage of 12 V to the thermoelectric device. The measured system. Since the air conditioning system is placed inside
electric current of the device exceeded Imax (the maximum the car-seat, its size should be small. The other is the appro-
critical electric current) according to the excessive applied priate power supply to yield the cool temperature of the
power. Consequently, the temperature of the warm side car-seat. Over-power supply can increase the temperatures
increased drastically, so the temperature of cool and the of both sides of the device. In this way, we confirmed that
warm side increased in a parallel mode because the heat suitable selections of the fan capacity and heat sink size as
was conducted from the warm side to the cool side. Due well as suitable input power can contribute to better cool-
to over-power, the temperature of the cool side was around ing effect and to the prevention of the heat conduction
27 C and that of the warm side was 72 C. Despite of the between the warm and cool side of the device. Through
the test results, the design specifications of the air condi-
tioning system and power supply for the car-seat were
decided. Also, according to the test results, to make the
device act as refrigerator in summer and heat pump in win-
ter, we only need to install an electronic switch which
changes the polarity of the input voltage since the warm
and cool side of the device is decided by the polarity of
the applied voltage.

3. Temperature control system utilizing thermoelectric device

3.1. Construction of the temperature control system


and its performance test

We designed an air conditioning structure to control


Fig. 4(a). Test of thermoelectric device. the temperature of the thermoelectric device built in the
H.-S. Choi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 27 (2007) 2841–2849 2845

Fig. 5. The temperature control module with air conditioner.

car-seat. Fig. 5 shows a structure module of the air condi-


Fig. 7. Performance test result of car-seat system.
tioning system composed of two thermoelectric devices and
an air pan. For efficient heat conduction, a heat sink of
350 · 38 · 10 (mm3) in size with a 2.5 mm fin gap was perature equilibrium can be upset, and without a robust
selected. A 10 W air fan was placed at the front of the duct temperature control system, the temperature can easily
to drop the temperature of the warm side of the device by increased due to the external conditions.
compulsory air blow as shown in Fig. 5.
We developed a car-seat system comprised of the air 3.2. The modeling of thermodynamics the car-seat system
conditioning system utilizing the thermoelectric devices as
shown in Fig. 6. The car-seat system is composed of two For efficient control of the temperature of the car-seat,
temperature control modules, each attached with two ther- mathematical modeling is required. The theoretical equa-
moelectric devices, as shown in Fig. 5. The two modules tions for the thermoelectric device performance includes
were placed in parallel, as shown in Fig. 6. In all, four the voltage equation [14,15] as
thermoelectric devices HM3930 were placed at a sufficient
distance to avoid mutual heat conduction. Temperature V ¼ aðT h  T L Þ þ IR ð1Þ
sensors were placed closest to the device since they cannot
The input power equation for the thermoelectric device is
be placed on the plate, and the sensors were bonded at the
described as
thin copper plate to conduct the heat between the human
body and the device. An insulating material was used to 1
QL ¼ aT L I  I 2 R  K t DT ð2Þ
prevent heat conduction from the warm side to the cool 2
side and human body. Fig. 7 shows the result of the tem- Eq. (2) is the numerical expression of the Peltier cooling ef-
perature test on the car-seat system. Two thermoelectric fect of the thermoelectric device. The first term on the right
devices were connected in series to supply 6 V to each hand side represents the drawn heat by the Peltier effect,
device since the supply voltage from the car battery is the second one describes the generated heat by the electric
12 V. By the serial connection of two same devices, the sup- current across the junction, and the last one represents the
ply voltage input to the device became 6 V. Although the reverse conductive heat flow from the heat source to the
temperature of the car-seat is balanced by the temperature cold sink due to the temperature difference of Th and TL.
control module using the air conditioning system, the tem- Initially, the thermoelectric device sustains the thermal
equilibrium with the surrounding or ambient air, but soon
the balance is broken by flow of the operating electric cur-
rents to the thermoelectric device.
While a vehicle driver is sitting on a car-seat as in Fig. 8,
heat transfer occurs between the seat and the driver’s body.
The system model equation of the temperature variation
between a cold junction of the device in the seat and the
vehicle driver’s body can be derived by introducing the first
law of the thermodynamics. The first law of the thermody-
namics accounts for the convective heat transfer on the sur-
face of the device, thermal energy drawn by the
introduction of the electric currents in the device, and the
variation of the stored energy in the device. From the first
law of the thermodynamics, the changing rate of the stored
energy in device, E_ st , can be given by the following equation:

Fig. 6. Appearance of developed car-seat system. E_ g  E_ out ¼ E_ st ð3Þ


2846 H.-S. Choi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 27 (2007) 2841–2849

dU t d
E_ st ¼ ¼ ðqVcT c Þ ¼ bT_ c ð6Þ
dt dt
where the term of E_ st means the changing rate of the ther-
mal energy in the device, b = qVc. Also, q, c, and V are the
density, specific heat, and the volume of the thermoelectric
device, respectively. In this paper, a heat load like human
body disturbance was not clearly described. But, if any heat
load like human body is applied to the seat of the device,
the electric voltage should be controlled depending on the
change of the heat load to keep the temperature control
performance.

3.3. The design of the temperature controller for the


thermoelectric device
Fig. 8. The system model of car-seat.
A robust controller was designed to maintain the com-
where E_ g is the energy generation rate in the thermoelectric fortable temperature of the car-seat system including the
device, and E_ out is the drawing rate of the heat from the de- air conditioning system. In the car-seat system, parameters
vice. The heat released from a heat element is absorbed by such as the thermodynamic coefficients of the device are
the cold side of a thermoelectric device and pumped to the very difficult to measure exactly. The dynamics equation
warm side by the device, which is described in the sche- in Eq. (2) is composed of many uncertain parameters. To
matic diagram as in Fig. 9. control the temperature of the device with many uncertain
The energy generation rate, E_ g , in Eq. (3) induced by the parameters, a robust control algorithm is required. The
applied electric currents in the device can be expressed as car-seat system can be best controlled by using an exact
model without parameter uncertainties, which is an almost
E_ g ¼ aT L I  K t DT ð4Þ impossible model to construct. For this reason, a robust
control algorithm is required to control the car-seat system
where the resistance of the thermoelectric device can be
along the reference input and compensate for the parame-
negligible due to its small value.
ter uncertainties.
The energy drawing rate from the warm side of the
As a promising robust controller, the sliding mode con-
device, E_ out , in Eq. (3) is due to the convective heat transfer,
trol scheme is proposed. This controller was initiated by
and can be described as
Itkis [16] and Utkin [17] for variable structure control.
E_ out ¼ ha ðT L  T a Þ ¼ P þ QL ¼ aIT h  K t ðT h  T c Þ ð5Þ Since then, many researchers have studied the sliding mode
control. An extensive survey on the sliding mode control
where ha is the heat transfer coefficient of air, and Ta is the was performed, where fundamental theory, main results,
surrounding temperature. The changing rate of the stored and practical applications of the variable structure control
energy in the device induced by temperature variation were introduced [18]. In applications of the sliding mode
can be expressed as control to the various systems including robot coordina-
tion, the robust sliding mode control proposed by Slotine
[19] was widely applied. Furthermore, a large number of
research results on the theory and application of sliding
mode control were presented [20,21]. The performances
of most of the proposed controllers were validated by com-
puter simulations. In this paper, for the implementation of
the sliding mode control algorithm using a one-chip pro-
cessor which has small internal memory, the simple and
easy sliding mode algorithm to implement in Slotine [19]
was applied to control the temperature of a car-seat system.
In order to set up the sliding mode controller for the sys-
tem shown in Fig. 8, we substituted Eqs. (4)–(6) into Eq.
(3), which yielded the following equation:
aT L I  K p ðT h  T L Þ  ha ðT L  T e Þ ¼ bT_ L : ð7Þ
Arranging Eq. (7) yields
1 a ha Kt
T_ L þ ðha  K t ÞT L ¼ T L I þ T e  T h ð8Þ
Fig. 9. Schematic diagram of heat flow in the thermoelectric device. b b b b
H.-S. Choi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 27 (2007) 2841–2849 2847

Eq. (8) can be rearranged as If KD is defined as Eq. (14), the closed-loop system
becomes stable such that TL converges to TLd. As a result,
T_ L þ gT L ¼ fT L I þ dT e þ lT h ð9Þ
the desired temperature of the car-seat system is achieved.
where g ¼ b1 ðha  K p Þ; f ¼ ba ; d ¼ hba ; l ¼  Kbt .
Eq. (9) represents the mathematical modeling on the 4. The performance test of temperature control system
temperature variation of the car-seat system including the
thermoelectric device. In this system, g, f, d, and l are The proposed sliding mode control algorithm was
the uncertain parameters, which are difficult to measure applied to an actual car-seat system, shown in Fig. 6. For
exactly. In order to control the uncertain system expressed this, a portable control system using a one-chip micropro-
as Eq. (9), a sliding mode control is designed as cessor was developed. The composition of the system is
1 explained
I¼ ðu  ^dT e  l
^T h þ ^
gT L  K D sgnðsÞÞ ð10Þ
^fT L r
4.1. The composition of the controller
where ur ¼ T_ cd  K_e; s ¼ e ¼ ðT L  T Ld Þ; T Ld is the de-
sired temperature, K is sliding control gain, and the error The configuration for the warm and cool temperature
state is the sliding mode. Also, ^ g; ^f; ^
d and l
^ are the esti- control system for the car-seat system is shown in
mates of g, f, d, and l, respectively. In Eq. (10), the sliding Fig. 10, and the composed hardware of the developed con-
mode s is expressed as trol system and power driving system for the thermoelectric
s ¼ e_  Ke ð11Þ device is shown in Fig. 11. The one-chip microprocessor
PIC16F873 was used as the central processing unit(CPU),
where e ¼ ðT L  T Ld Þ; ur ¼ T_ Ld  ^e. Substituting Eq. (11) and its specification is shown in Table 3. The power driving
into Eq. (10) yields system for the device was developed by using the FET
n power electronics device, which can convert the directions
T_ L þ aT L ¼ ður  ^aT e  ^cT h  K D sgnðsÞÞ ð12Þ of the electric currents. The time delay part was designed
^
n
to prevent damage to the electronic devices in the power
Arranging Eq. (12) yields driving system from the over-currents when the current
( )
^
nn _ direction is converted. The input power source to the
e_  Ke ¼ ðT Ld  ^e þ ða  ^
aÞT L Þ  K D sgnðsÞ device is the DC 12 V of the battery in the car, and
^
n LM35 was applied as the temperature sensor. The cool
ð13Þ temperature for the summer and warm temperature for
the winter are programmed as reference inputs, and selec-
where sgn(s) is defined as
tion is made by the exterior switch.
if s > 1; sgnðsÞ ¼ þ1;
if s < 1; sgnðsÞ ¼ 1; 4.2. The test of the temperature control used by robust
controller
and the control gain KD is defined as
 
^  The sliding mode control to the car-seat system was
n  n _ 
KD >  ðT Ld  ^e þ ða  ^
aÞT L Þ ð14Þ implemented by using the developed control and power
 ^n 
driving system. In the implementation of the developed

Fig. 10. Hardware configuration.


2848 H.-S. Choi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 27 (2007) 2841–2849

Fig. 11. Hardware of controller and driver.

Table 3
Feature of PIC16F873
Architecture Speed FLASH ROM RAM I/O Timer ADC
RISC 20 MHz–20 ns 8 kW 256 Byte 368 Byte 22 Channel Two 8 bit timer 5 Channel, 10 bit
& Counter, One 16 bit
Timer & Counter

controller, the loop-time for the system was set to 22.5(ms) conditions, performance of the proposed controller was
using the internal timer and interrupter. The reference tem- evaluated for the cool and the warm temperature. The
perature inputs to the cool side of the thermoelectric device results from both tests are presented in Figs. 12 and 13.
in the controller were set to 10 C for the cooling tempera- According to Fig. 12, the cooling temperature converged
ture and 50 C for the warm temperature. The capacity of to the reference temperature of 10 C by the control action.
the air fan was 10 W, and the fan dropped the temperature Also, in the case of the reference temperature 50 C, the
of the warm side by air circulation. The ambient tempera- controlled temperature converged to the reference input
ture for the performance test of the control system was as shown in Fig. 13. The converging times for the former
28 C. The sliding mode control scheme was applied in was 2.2(s) and 1(s) for the latter. Although the robust con-
both tests, which were simply coded since the internal troller showed some over-shoot and under-shoot response,
memory capacity of the one-chip was limited. Under these its response time was fast and the closed-loop response

Fig. 12. Temperature control of the desired temperature 10 C. Fig. 13. Temperature control of the desired temperature 50 C.
H.-S. Choi et al. / Applied Thermal Engineering 27 (2007) 2841–2849 2849

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