Experimental study of the effects of input voltage on the transient temperature behaviors of thermoelectric mini-cold storage

The use of commonly used vapor compression cycle cold storage in fishing vessel is facing limitations to be widely applied in Indonesian fishermen since it consumes more energy and requires large space. Thermoelectric refrigerator is believed to be a promising option due to its simple design and low energy requirement. However, the Coefficient of Performance (CoP) of the system in current development is relatively low. Although many researches have been conducted to increase the CoP of the system But there is still lack of studies focused on effects of the important variables to cold storage performance. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of input voltage on thermoelectric cold storage chamber temperature in the form of transient behaviors. As a result, it was found that the increase of input voltage significantly affected the cooling performance, although in 6 V input voltage, the result is only a bit lower than 12 V with much lower energy use. In addition, the time needed to get steady state in 12 V was the fastest compared to the other input voltages. Those results can be used as design consideration of a portable thermoelectric cold storage.