Digital temperature control project using Peltier modules to improve the maintenance of battery lifetime

The lifetime of a battery depends mainly on the operating temperature. Thus, this paper proposes a low cost refrigeration system applied to batteries temperature control. In the proposed system, Peltier modules (thermoelectrical devices, which uses the Peltier effect for heat exchange) are used to refrigerate the system. In addition are compared the performance of two control strategies (conventional PI and P+I), applied to the system temperature control. It is shown that the P+I controller has a better performance than the conventional PI controller due to its characteristic of present higher control effort at the initial time. It is proposed, though, a structure with the P+I controller to correct the windup problem. Moreover, the transfer function of the system was obtained applying a system identification method, in order to improve the control precision and to reduce the complexity in obtaining the system model. The prototype is still in development stage, in this way, the results were obtained by simulation.