Performance investigation of a portable liquid cooling garment using thermoelectric cooling

Abstract

• The temperature of the hot end greatly affects the cooling effect. • A specific cooling temperature is proposed to evaluate the overall cooling performance. • 70% of the cooling effect decline comes from worse heat dissipation at the hot side. Liquid cooling garment (LCG) have been developed to reduce heat stress and improve human thermal comfort in hot environments. In this study, a novel thermoelectric LCG was developed to improve the portability and cooling performance of cooling garments. A specific cooling temperature was proposed to assess the overall cooling performance of the LCG and its value is 6.6 ℃/kg, which is a significant improvement over the previous cooling garment. The LCG is tested by using human trial to study the effect of ambient temperature and the temperature of the hot side of the cooling unit on the cooling performance of the cooling garments. The research results show that both the ambient temperature and the temperature of the hot side of the cooling unit will have an inhibitory effect on the cooling performance of the LCG. In addition, the contribution percentage of the worse heat dissipation from the hot side of the semiconductor chilling plate to the environment ( E G ) and the heating of the region surrounding the sensors ( E H ) to the decrease in the cooling effect of the LCG was determined. The experimental results show that the E G value is maintained at about 70% in different ranges of ambient temperature, which indicates that when the ambient temperature increases, the main factor leading to the declines of the cooling performance of the LCG is the worse heat dissipation at the hot side of the cooling unit. The E H value is about 30%, which shows that it is necessary to consider the heating of the region surrounding the sensor to reduce the error of testing the cooling performance of the cooling garment. The results of this paper can provide direction and basis for further improving the cooling performance of thermoelectric LCG, and can significantly improve the accuracy of the cooling performance test results in the future.