KOOLRITE
Often when mother serves lunch or dinner it is piping hot and we have to wait patiently for it to cool. Also sometimes baby’s milk is too hot and the baby is crying hungrily. Not any more. With COOLRITE you can determine the temperature of food or the milk and cool it to the right temperature very quickly and easily.
The device is a tapering hollow stainless steel (or pvc) body shaped like the frustrum of a hollow cone, six inches high with a circular base four inches in diameter. It has a stainless steel supporting rod with a stainless steel alligator clip, on one side that could be clipped to the edge of any dish. The upper conical portion carries the cooling fan and can be detached to allow the supporting rod to be sterilized if necessary though it will not contact the food. It also has digital temperature thermometer on it. It’s use is simple – clip it to the dish, place the chip marked under the hot dish/container; the fan comes on automatically, and watch the temperature fall.
It can be used to cool solid food like pizzas or pies, liquid food like soups and curries, and it sits snug on any feeding bottle to cool baby’s milk (with an adaptor) to the right temperature with the supporting rod detached.
It works on the Peltier effect with the hot junction being the chip, and the cold junction at the fan. A voltage is generated and this voltage drives the fan. As the food cools the fans slows down in speed and a digital temperature guage continuously displays the temperature. A thermostat can be included in the circuit to make it more finite but is unnecessary.
(I had a sketch with this description but it did not get saved with the text.)
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I've heard of many coolers/heaters based upon this principle. Not withstanding, you could also reverse the current flow to heat the food as well.
A cone is rigid enough a structure so that no center support is necessary. An extension of the lower edge of the cone to a clip to grasp the outer circle of the dish being cooled should be sufficient without contacting the food. Better yet a framework of three rods to form a tripod to support the sructure outside the circumference of the dish could support a battery driven fan. I sincerely doubt the peltier effect could generate enough energy to drive a fan so the core concept, it seems to me, is unworkable.
integdes: Are you saying that you are using a power source to drive current through the Peltier Junction and use the fan to dissipate the heat,
or
are you saying that you are trying to generate power with the Peltier Junction to operate a fan?
If you are trying to generate power to operate a fan, then I agree with Sand that the idea is unworkable. However, if you are using 120VAC and driving a rectified transformer, than that is possible. See Peltier Heat Exchangers
Assuming you are powering the system: I don't personally like the cone idea because it becomes unsightly at the dinner table. However, if you used a flat plate (square, round, semicircular, it doesn't matter) and transferred the heat to (or from) a tube mounted at the edge of the plate (with the very small fan mounted in the tube), then as the temperature sensor demands, the hot/cold plate would control the temperature of the container placed upon it.
Additionally, if an intrinsically safe jumper plug were made, then multiple hot/cold plates could be interconnected on the same table with only a single small wire daisy chaining them all together. This would considerably reduce the amount of wires showing on the table.
Therefore, each dish could be controlled at a different temperature. Salads could be kept cool, a roast hot, the wine bottle slightly chilled, ...
Although, on occasion, a meal is off temperature, normal cautions usually get the food within an acceptable temperature range with no technological gagetry necessary to set things right. There comes a point when technology becomes so grotesque as to be a bad joke.