Optimal Design of Power Supply for Semiconductor Refrigeration

The special optimal powering requirements of semiconductor refrigeration were deeply analyzed from both the refrigeration principle aspect and the unique characteristics of thermoelectric cooling device's materials and fabrication processes. Accordingly, based on MPU, CPLD and PWM techniques, designed a programmed heavy power supply for driving semiconductor cooling chips. The detailed hardware and software implementations were also presented. The power supply can individually power 24 coolers simultaneity and up to 32 instances of it can be easily linked together to be controlled by the same controller, its overall output voltage, overall modulation frequency and each output's duty cycle and polarity can be flexibly programmed. It has been adopted in a large temperature control system. The applications show that it gives an effective hardware mean to implement optimal control of semiconductor cooling, and can be used as a general high performance power supply for thermoelectric refrigeration.