Peltier Seat Heaters

I have to tell you, I have no idea if all seat heaters are Peltier elements or not? But I sure hope so! These came from a lincoln navigator 2018. And I am very excited at the possibilities. Now my application is to create a "Dry Box" for 3D Printer filament. But these could be used for a number of things.

There are 2 of these and a very nice centripetal squirrel cage fan with two outlets. And the way they work is they pick up the air under the seat, filter it, then depending on the polarity of the peltier element, they will ether heat or cool the seat. In the image bellow, you will see that the this assumes the seat is set to cool. So the vent shown here in blue, is blowing in to the back of the seat, and the hot air is vented under the seat again.

Inside the seat is a bunch of duct work, two elements (bottom of seat and back of seat) the fan and the wire. Once you remove one, its fairly easy after that. My goal is to set it up so the air (already warm) from a storage box is fed in to the Peltier, then gravity will allow the water to drop and the cold and hot air to filter back in to the box. However, the water will fall through a small opening and prevent re-evaporation. To Test this, I have printed this on my ender 3 pro.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/1a57cf643fd7d43a4db47e36/w/e26ef1f9d3c83f95b5edcd52/e/010a7ee6e812ee6f4ce45c18

Its not the nicest print, but it will force the cool air to take a 90o turn and go back in the the heated box. But allow the water to fall off the cold copper heat sync in to an awaiting container bellow it. If this works, I will take two of these units side by side with one blower attached and use it to capture the moisture in the warm air.

With luck, this will be built in to a box, then about one every week it will automatically go through an 4 hour long cycle of removing the excuse water from the air. Then it will be maintained the rest of the time with a fan/space heater/RV Desiccant device I am also building. Look for that one in the 3D printer section.

The wires attached to this device are 2 for the thermistor (presumably to stop it from getting hot enough to catch fire and two for the Peltier (12vDC) Remember, if you hook it up backwards, then the vent side will blow cold air instead of hot air and that will mean the thermal cut off wont work AND the wrong side is getting hot.

If you look here, you will see the second iteration I have been working on while I wait for the print to complete. I figured having two in one unit was ok, because there are 4 of these per vehicle, and I managed to get 7 (someone beat me too one of them lol).

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/bea303265e0e3dd5c58f3d3c/w/859b103460b078a438f5a4ff/e/04fd11f688046c875ad9478a

Then I also have to collect the air pressure from the Fan. These fans are not amazing at PSI, they are great a CFM. I will let you look that up. Here is what I have so far:

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/bd4ece0dd56237f72bfd45c2/w/cec5f304890b368ea81b3c64/e/93d4de834382eb5b05d6cc37

The two offset outputs will go in to the offset inputs on the bracket. I havent figured out the rest yet. but thats the fun of having a 3D Printer :). I think what I will do is vent out the back of the duct above, and have that go in to the in-side of the Peltier pairs.

More to come. I seem to be unable to put this project down...

I had time to do a teardown of one of the Elements. The two black wires are a ntc thermistor. I will attach at the bottom the datasheet for the one I THINK is in this device.