- Index
- BeerThermoregulationSystem
- Subprojects/Components
- Power specs and power supply requirements
- Heat exchanger body
Beer thermoregulation system based on Peltier devices. Embeds mechanical design and electronic designs (as submodules) This project aims to provide a complete electo-mechanical design whose role is to regulate fermenting beer temperature, using water-based heat exchanger.
It comes with 3 main hardware components (as opposed to 4 at the early days of the design) :
- Main heat exchanger body with 3D Cad design and 3D printed enclosures.
- BTS-LogicBoard : electronic logic board whose role is to drive the power board with appropriate signals. It is full-featured and I designed it in a way that allows further improvements and extensions.
- BTS-MainBoard-Power : this electronic board drives the 8 Peltier modules used in this project and effectively acts as the main temperature regulation actuator. It was designed to work at relatively high frequencies (> 1MHz ) in order to reduce the overall board size and components price.
Each Peltier module (12v, 40x40 mm TEC12706, manufacturer datasheet) is able to draw 6.4Amps and move 57W each, which is the absolute maximum ratings for these devices ; in reality their efficiency is much lower, which explains the numbers ! The power board itself was designed to handle 40 Amps DC @ 12Volts (hence 480 W), in order to feed those 8 Peltier modules with around 5 Amps each, in both cooling and heating directions.
For my tests, I'm using a beefy PC ATX power supply (12V, 40Amps max) with around 600W capabilities. These board setup is running it to its very limits and I think that's not a good idea on the long run. So the PSU should be at least this powerful and able to deliver 40A+ steady DC current at 12V.
