OK, here's the promised pictures of my thermoelectric temperature chamber (or the freezerator as nein166 calls it). These are from 2004. I've since added white LED interior lighting.
Overview of the entire chamber:
Here's the chamber part in case anyone is curious (inside measures 10"x10'x14"):
Multipaned plastic viewing window:
Cold sink (note temperature sensor IC on chamber ceiling):
These are copper heat sinks that I made. Altogether at full load they dissipate over 500W of TEC power plus up to 200W of pumped heat (much less as the temperature drops), for a total of over 700W. And they do so while keeping the hot side of the TEC only about 3° C higher than the tap water temperature. Since this is intermittantly used, I don't recirculate the water via an external air-to-air heat exchanger. Rather, I just throw it away, or send it to the garden in the warmer months. I only use about 30 gph, so it is more cost effective to do so.
Here's a picture of the control panel with unit in operation (note -55.63°F actual chamber temperature). The auxiliary display shows 47.6°F, which is the heat sink temperature (tap water in February is around 41°F). I use a two stage setup. 6 modules in the first stage cool the hot side of 3 modules running at lower current in the second stage. I had problems with condensation at one point, and some of my modules are performing a little less than optimally. Still, I can reach under -55°F in the winter months. I'm thinking of replacing the 70W first stage modules with 85W ones. This will probably let me reach roughly -65°F.
Those two large main power supply transformers are cooled by the copper plates with water tubes. You can see some large filter caps right under the transformers.
Here's a top view:
The large toroids on top are inductors for the power supply. The tubes you barely see in the middle of the picture cool the power supply MOSFETs.
The fan is just to ensure a slight airflow over the large black voltage regulator heat sink and the aforementioned inductors. It only comes on when the chamber runs at or near full power. With these two exceptions, everything is water cooled. The MOSFET cooling tubes are more visible here.
Here's the display boards shown from a front view (sorry about the blurring):
Closeup of the control panel:
The chamber can also heat by running the second stage modules in reverse. I need to limit my temps in heating mode to about 200°F because the chamber fans and some of the plastics used to line the chamber can't take much more than that. BTW, when under no load the second stage cold plates get down to about -80°F, and that numbs your fingers in a few seconds (yes, I touched it). Just for kicks once when I was testing I put a TEC on the second stage cold plate, and a temperature probe on the TEC's cold side. I covered it with insulation and let the whole thing cool down to -80°F or so. I then powered the TEC. Of course, the aluminum cold plate it was sitting on heated up pretty fast (a relative term since it likely never got above -20°F during this whole procedure), so any temps I reached wouldn't be maintainable, but I did see the temperature probe reach about -110°F before it started creeping up again.
Besides testing electronics, I did this simply as a fun, long term project. I started the chamber in 1995. It took me over three years to get everything working right. It started out as air-cooled but I couldn't get much under 0°F. By small increments I made refinements and got lower temperatures. This included changes in both the heat sinks and also in making the chamber leak heat less. My first attempt at liquid cooling didn't go well-I used aluminum plates instead of copper. This meant using epoxy instead of solder to hold everything together. Epoxy and water don't mix long term. Hence, water-damaged TECs. Also, scaling developed inside the channels which compromised the efficiency of the heat sinks.
Besides changes in the physical setup I tried two makes of TECs. The second make was much better in terms of lower temperatures and durability. I also redid the power supply to get the efficiency up to about 95%. And then there was the problem of maintaining the set temperature. You can't get stable temperatures by just turning the TECs on and off. I designed a PID (proportional-integral-differential) controller which cut TEC power just enough to maintain temperature as the set point was reached. The unit can maintain stable temperatures within about 0.02°F of setpoint. While the chamber uses well over 500 watts at minimum temperature, it uses much less when set to maintain higher values. For example, to maintain 0°F I only need about 40 watts. To hold -20°F will use maybe 100 watts. Operating as a refrigerator (32°F) uses just a few watts. Of course at higher settings I can cut my water flow from 30 gph to 1 or 2 gph since I'm removing far less heat.
BTW, commercial temperature range is -40°C to 85°C (-40°F to 185°F). That's what I usually need to test over. I'd like to be able to get the chamber extemes to match the military range eventually, which is -55°C to 125°C (-67°F to 257°F).
It's a shame that no better thermoelectric materials than bismuth telluride have been commercialized in the 40+ years TECs have existed. I've heard researchers have found a few promising candidates. Since my chamber only requires about 25 watts of cooling power to maintain -67°F in theory if a TEC operating at Carnot efficiency existed I would only need about 10 watts of input power. I could make such a chamber using simple air cooling as the heatsink would only need to deal with 35 watts. I'd even be happy with TECs running at half the Carnot efficiency. I could hold -67°F with ~20 watts, and approach -200°F with less than 200 watts. There is plenty of incentive to make better TECs to eventually replace compressor-based cooling. I think we'll see a major breakthrough within the next decade