A portable direct-PV thermoelectric vaccine refrigerator with ice storage through heat pipes

The objective of this research work was to develop a portable solar refrigeration system capable of maintaining vaccine temperatures between 2 °C and 8 °C. The main system under this study consisted of thermoelectric modules as cooling generators with latent heat energy storage (LHES) using water as cooling backup along with heat pipes as passive temperature controllers to avoid freezing the vaccines.;The system was fabricated and tested. The results showed that the system can maintain the vaccine storage temperature at 2 °C and 8 °C under ambient temperature up to 30 °C with minimum power consumption of 30 Watt. The proposed heat pipes to maintain the vaccine storage temperature satisfied the design criteria. However, the energy consumption of the TEM was higher than anticipated. A small vapor compressor system was tested and shows promise to replace the TEM for cooling. Inserting the aluminum matrix in the ice chamber not only decreased the charging time but also decreased the discharging time since less phase change material was available for energy storage.;Three models of the system were developed under different assumptions. The lumped model was adequate to predict the system performance during charging process. The other distributed models were able to predict the melting and cooling time more accurately than that of the lumped model and provided more detailed on the temperature distribution and change of the water phase in the ice chamber.