Low power heater design on flexible printed circuit board for incubator application
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Date
2018-05-01
Authors
Solehah Md Hashim
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Abstract
Incubator is equipment used to grow and maintain a stable environment for infants, eggs, animals, cell and living organism. Conventionally, the incubators are commonly bulky, heavy and high power consumption. Therefore, a flexible heater is proposed to design a light-weight and power efficient incubator. However, flexible heater is only available in series connection, which may cause high power consumption in incubator. Therefore, flexible heater in parallel configuration is studied in this project. The heater is designed using Ansys software and dimensions for the heater is 1.62m (length), 0.33m (width) and 35μm (thickness). The heater is fabricated at QDOS Technology Sdn Bhd. Three tests are conducted which are; 1) Functionality test of single heater, series heater and parallel heater, 2) Series and parallel heater with and without fan test in the incubator, 3) Series and parallel heater with and without fan test using switching control system in incubator. Microcontroller is used in this project. Results show that for heating process, series heater with fan and parallel heater with fan can save more power by 12.5% and 13.8% compared to series heater without fan and parallel heater without fan. Results also show that the series heater without fan and parallel heater without fan can reduce power by 6.37% and 16.9% during cooling process. Therefore, for cooling process, heater without fan is better than heater with fan. In the third test, results show that by using switching control the parallel heater with fan at heating stage and the parallel heater without fan at cooling stage can reduce power by 48.66% compared to other heaters. As a conclusion parallel heater consumes less power and suitable for incubator application.