Embedded Files
Sponsored by Professor Renkun Chen
University of California, San Diego
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
MAE 156 A/B: Senior Design Project (Winter 2025 - Spring 2025)
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Background
Background
Due to climate change, rising temperatures around the world have created an unsafe and unhealthy environment to live and work. This issue has resulted in hazardous living conditions, heat illnesses, and even death. Chen's Labs and the Cooling Garment project team are seeking to create safer living conditions for those affected by climate change by creating a garment that self-cools in extreme temperatures (ideally 40°C) by transporting and cooling water through the water tube to cool hotspots in a person's body. Our objectives are to create a lightweight cooling garment that can regulate body temperature for 4-6 hours, while maintaining practical aspects of normal clothing, such as flexibility and washability.
Functional Requirements
Functional Requirements
Primary:
4-6 hours of operation
Ensure cooling in an ambient temperature of 30-40 °C
Meeting the weight restriction of 1-2 kg
Secondary:
Customizability of cooling delivered
Modular design for ease of washability
Our Solution: Final Design
The innovative Personal TEC-Based Liquid Cooling Garment uses flexible thermoelectric cooling (TEC) devices to keep the wearer comfortable. Unlike current products on the market featuring bulky ice-pack systems, this cooling garment uses compact TEC units with flexible heatsinks to cool down a lightweight, closed-loop water system that draws heat from the user's body.
With a silicone tube across the back drawing heat from the user's body, the water inside the tubing is pumped to the TEC units, cooled, and recirculated to ensure temperature control. The entire device is battery-powered, featuring onboard controllers to adjust comfort level, as well as a net weight of under 2kg.
For convenience, the cooling garment is modular, allowing major electronic components to be removable and for the garment to be machine-washable. Heatsinks and other airflow-reliant parts clip into ventilated areas or external pockets for optimal performance.
Final Design Layout
Summary of Performance Results:
Testing showed that all four TEC cooling units in the system performed consistently with each other across multiple trials, with the average cold side temperature of 14.9°C at the highest cooling setting of 100% power resulting in a net cooling capacity of 27.58 W. While this mark is just below the target range of 30–40 W, the cooling garment still delivers effective cooling comfort for users.
The system maintained an internal water temperature around 19.5°C, despite exposure to a 40°C heating pad on a mannequin wearing the cooling garment. While this test suggests good performance against external heat sources, further testing on actual human subjects is recommended to fully characterize the garment's performance in a realistic setting. Alternative battery configurations also showed that while a lightweight battery configuration could reduce the total weight of the garment to 1.6 kg, it only offered around 53 minutes of runtime. A heavier battery configuration would raise the net weight to 2.2 kg, but could achieve up to an estimated 4 hours of runtime. The weight and battery requirements of the project could not be fully balanced, with the system only meeting one at the cost of the other, indicating that further testing should be conducted to optimize the system in order to meet both requirements simultaneously. Overall, the garment met key functional requirements like flexibility, comfort, and modularity, with only slight shortcomings in runtime and total cooling capacity.
Poster:
Poster Template.pptx.pdfCool Media Below!
Risk Reduction Experimentation using a Thermocouple
Risk Reduction Experimentation using a Thermocouple
Prototype Video Demonstration
Prototype Video Demonstration
Tubing Placement Testing
Final Design Circuit Diagram
Page updated
Report abuse