Brain cooling in medicine is the most effective method in protecting brain cells during strokes, heart attacks, and brain traumas. This method, called brain hypothermia, is based on the principle that the brain is superficially cooled under controlled conditions in order to minimize cell death. In this study a helmet was designed to locally cool the brain and an effective controller was designed and tested using fuzzy logic in order to test the effectiveness of the helmet for brain hypothermia. For testing the cooling and heating performances of the helmet, currents between 0 and 60 A were applied to the helmet and its characteristic shape. In considering that the helmet could be exposed to external thermal loads, its maximum cooling capacity at different currents was calculated and found to be 153 W. Two applications were was placed inside and the time the system took to re-balance itself was measured. It was observed that this controller design for a thermoelectric brain cooler can be an alternative method for brain hypothermia thanks to its performance.It was determined that it has advantages over other similar systems thanks to features like it is electrically controllable, has a direct connection to the surface to be cooled and thereby provides faster cooling and heating, its balancing of the thermal loads rapidly applied to the system, and that it is easy to set the cooling and heating speeds via software.
In this study, a thermoelectric ice machine (TEIM) with a heat pipe was designed to save water and energy in ice making. Traditional ice machines have a long ice-making time. That is why they make ice and expend energy to maintain the ice form. Since the ice made is hand-harvested, it is likely to be contaminated. The proposed system saves energy by making ice fast when needed and saves water by making ice as needed. The ice machine was designed to freeze water in the icebox with direct thermal contact with the thermoelectric (TE) cooling unit. The cooling unit contains a TE module placed between the icebox and the heat-transfer system with a dual-fan heat pipe. Despite its low efficiency, the system has advantages such as compactness, portability, environmental friendliness and low maintenance requirements. The system turns 10 g of water into ice in 5 min by spending 0.025 kWh of power and harvests the ice automatically. It is possible to make 2880 g of ice per day using the TEIM. An important advantage of the system is that it harvests the ice automatically; therefore, it does not cause contamination.
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