车载冰箱单极驱动实现稳定温度

　　The rub is that bidirectional-TEC drive tends to be an inconvenient design problem. It requires either dual bipolar power supplies or relatively complex H-bridge-drive output circuits involving arrays of power transistors that selectively reverse the TEC excitation as the required direction of heat flow dictates. But an alternative method offers advantages whenever si mplicity matters more than efficiency. This Design Idea presents a novel approach to bidirectional-TEC-temperature control that avoids both the inconvenience of dual power supplies and the complexity of bidirectional drive. It works by exploiting a little-known quirk of all TECs: the inherent reversal of net heat flow at unconventionally high levels of drive current.

　　The specifications of every TEC include IMAX, the drive current that results in maximum net cooling. Plotting heat

transfer versus drive current relative to IMAX results in a typical parabolic curve (Figure 1). The left-hand, gray half of the plot in the figure shows the usual bipolar TEC’s operating region, which confines drive current to the range of –0.5×IMAX

　　Figure 2 shows an implementation of the concept in a high-performance PID (proportional-integral-derivative)-feedback loop. The component count is less than one-fourth that of a comparable bipolar-drive design. Feedback stability is robust, and settling time is short. The downside is a current draw as much as 150% higher than that for a conventional bipolar driver, which limits the technique to applications in which power consumption and heat dissipation aren’t critical priorities and small TECs are adequate.

　　英文原文地址：http://www.edn.com/article/CA6505571.html