Performance improvement of a portable thermoelectric cooling/heating cabinet for blood cold chain application

Thermoelectric (TE) cooling and heating are suitable for blood storage cabinet applications due to their portability, low power consumption, no noise, and being environmentally friendly. The temperature range for blood refrigerated storage is 4.0±2.0 °C then, before the blood is injected into the human body, it must gradually warm up to 37±1.0 °C within 10 minutes. However, it could be sensitive to environmental temperature control. Therefore, this study investigates thermoelectric cooling and heating to explore the temperature performance under various case studies, including operational voltages during cooling and heating, ambient temperature, and the load of the blood storage cabinet. The results demonstrated that the blood heater/cooler system can cool to 4.0 °C for 12 V power input and heat up to 37 °C for 3.0 to 4.0 V power input. It verifies that our novel thermoelectric system design can be applied in the blood storage cabinet.