SUMMARY

Industries such as automobiles, oil exploration, military hardware, etc often deal with harsh environment (temperatures 150 oC- 200 oC), which makes it difficult to use conventional electronics for tasks such as performance monitoring, and data acquisition. Commercial-off-the-shelf electronics can survive up to 125 oC, hence the electronics currently used are pre-screened for the desired temperature and assembled with or without cooling systems that are limited in cooling capacity and/ or need to be reset/ recharged. This offsets cost benefits and hinders continuous operation. While high temperature compatible electronics could provide a solution in future, immediate concerns could be addressed by compact thermal management systems that should work without having to be reset and require less maintenance (human interference during system operation must be ruled out). Also, the system should be scalable to smaller sizes without loss of performance. In this backdrop the proposed research aims at realization of an adsorption cooling system for evaporator temperatures in the range of 140 oC-150 oC, and condenser temperature in the range of 160 oC-200 oC. Adsorption cooling systems have few moving parts, and the use of ThermoElectric (TE) devices to regenerate heat of adsorption in between adsorbent beds enhances the compactness and efficiency of the overall ‘ThermoElectric-Adsorption’ (TEA) system. The work presented identifies the challenges involved and respective solutions for high temperature application. An experimental set up was fabricated to demonstrate system operation and mathematical models developed to benchmark experimental results. Also, it should be noted that TEA system comprises TE and adsorption chillers. A TE device can be a compact cooler in its own right. Hence a comparison of the performance of TEA and TE cooling systems has also been presented.