Final Presentation

We capped the semester off by presenting the cooler in the BYU - Idaho Capstone open house. It was a lot of fun to show off the cooler and teach people about the technology we used. There aren't very many people who understand how a thermoelectric module works.

It has been a relief to be done with the cooler although I do miss the excitement of trying to continually improve the concept. We'll see what changes may come about in the future.....

Displaying additional thermoelectric modules and we even filled a small container with dry ice to demonstrate how a thermoelectric module can be used as a thermoelectric generator to produce electricity.
Displaying step-by-step pictures of our cooler building process
The final product...

Finished Product

Testing the solar panel: I tested the voltage coming out of the panel and we were at right around 22 volts. This feeds into the charge controller and then charges the batter at 12 volts.

Side View: Here the black weather stripping is visible. The black actually adds a nice accent to the white cooler.

We placed the final acrylic section into the lid this afternoon.

We finally finished the modifications on the cooler this afternoon. We placed a piece of black weather stripping along the front side to help seal the lid tight. We also placed the last piece of acrylic into the lid. All in all it looks really good and turned out better than we expected.

Solar-Powered Camping Cooler Day 1

The three cooler models (82 Qt. Coleman Ultimate Xtreme (Green), 100 Qt. Coleman Xtreme (Blue), 120 Qt. Igloo cooler (White))

A collection of all our equipment ready to be installed into the cooler

Brainstorming as to where we should put the 7.5 Ahr battery

Using the hole saw to mount the clear the way for the hot-side fan intake

One module assembly mounted up nice and snug inside the cooler... nice!

The first step was to pick between the 3 different styles of coolers we had received from Coleman and Igloo. We chose the Igloo 120 Qt cooler due to its large size and similar insulating qualities with the Coleman Xtreme series. We were going to need to add additional insulation to whatever cooler we chose in order to minimize heat losses. For this reason the bigger cooler allowed us to add more insulation and still have around ~ 40 -50 Qt capacity. The big accomplishment of the day was to mount the modules into the cooler. I received some mounting advice from a friend at JBT AreoTech which proved to be a great configuration. After drilling though the plastic and insulation things mounted up nice and solid. It made for a late night and a few bloody knuckles but it was worth the effort!