Fundamental design of thermoelectrical nature air conditioning system in small room for living cat (mammalian)

Abstract

Living mammalian especially European cats will face some problems when traveling from cold ambient in Europe to hot ambient country. Some of the problems are, these cats will become panting when exposed to the high temperature of ambient for a short term. Also, for a long term exposed to high temperature, the cats will experience heat stress and hair loss. The objectives of this study are on cat thermal comfort, cooling load for cat compartment, and analysis of air flow to achieve the desired temperature for the cat compartment using CFD simulation. In this study, three parts of analysis will be considered in CFD simulations which are the thermal distribution for four Peltier plates with aluminium heat sink using ANSYS Transient Thermal, air flow in the ducting to a cold heat sink, and air flow distribution in cat compartment using ANSYS Fluent. The temperature for the Persian cat’s thermal comfort is around 20-25°C. Cooling load gain from designed portable cat compartment with the desired space is 177 W. By ANSYS Transient Thermal, time taken for heat sink change from 22°C to 12°C is around 200-250 seconds. Then, by using ANSYS Fluent, the temperature of initial air temperature in the ducting when flow through a cold heat sink was changed from 27.15°C to 20.93°C by simple cooling. Next, the average air temperature in the cat’s compartment is 23.83°C that achieved average thermal comfort for mammal or Persian cat which is 20-25°C of dry bulb temperature. However, the study only focuses on steady-state dry air simple cooling analysis only with the laminar flow as a preliminary result by CFD simulation before build the actual portable cat compartment. The dry air simulation can be assumed similar as humid air for simple cooling process only proved by the comparison of the same cooling capacities values towards the different value of absolute humidity.