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Old 24-09-2014, 08:21 AM
Garbz (Chris)
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Garbz is offline
 
Join Date: May 2012
Location: Brisbane
Posts: 644
No.

This is a feature of imperfect TECs called thermal runaway.

The idea is that there's a limit of how fast heat can be dissipated from the hot side, and there's a max delta-T between the hot and cold face of a TEC. Once that delta T is reached (and it'd dependent on the TEC surface temperature at the heatsink NOT AMBIENT TEMP), heat will flow from the hot side to the cold side. The controller compensates by making driving the TEC harder which makes it worse and worse and worse.

On a cold day things are better. The heat of the chip will warm the cold side and the cold ambient temperature will cool the warm side more efficiently. But on a warm day you may find that after you get past a certain point things break down quite quickly. I typically avoid going over 80% on my TEC, but most of the time I don't have problem getting to -25degC, especially in winter where I can do it at around 50% power. Also this problem is more likely to happen at startup where the controller will overdrive the TEC to get it to cool as quickly as possible. Warm ambient + warm cold side at startup + lots of power into the TEC is a recipe for thermal runaway.


If you suffer thermal runaway, drop the controller into manual and back the power off to something like 30%. You'll see the temperature rise and then at some point start dipping again. When it settles out you can try going back into auto.

The only engineering solution to this is a massively over-designed heatsink, or a clever control scheme to detect it and back off when it happens.
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