1. Printing: This poster is 48” wide by 36” high. It’s designed to be printed on a large-format printer. Customizing the Content: The placeholders in this poster are formatted for you. Type in the placeholders to add text, or click an icon to add a table, chart, SmartArt graphic, picture or multimedia file. To add or remove bullet points from text, just click the Bullets button on the Home tab. If you need more placeholders for titles, content or body text, just make a copy of what you need and drag it into place. PowerPoint’s Smart Guides will help you align it with everything else. Want to use your own pictures instead of ours? No problem! Just right-click a picture and choose Change Picture. Maintain the proportion of pictures as you resize by dragging a corner. Therap-E Thermally Regulated Alleviating Peltier Enclosure ABSTRACT The Thermally Regulated Alleviating Peltier Enclosure (Therap-E) is a knee brace designed to provide relief to people suffering from joint pain. Therap-E uses Peltier devices to safely apply heat or cold therapy in the enclosed area. The device is temperature regulated, thus the user can select a temperature, and using thermal sensors that are paired with each Peltier devices, therap-E is able to reach and maintain the temperature. In America, more than 1/3 of adults suffer from knee pain. Applying hot and cold stimulation to knee joint where there is little soft tissue has proven to be an effective part of pain relief and therapy. Some products that currently exist on the market are the Heat Therapy Elbow Wraps priced at $130 and the Breg Polar Care Cub Cold Therapy Brace at $145. These products can only heat and cool, respectively. A product that offers heating and cooling is provided by Dhama Innovations for $300. These devices lack active temperature monitoring. Injuries such as burns or frost bites can occur to the user. Currently, the market does not a have a solution for joint therapy that's widely available and provides both heating and cooling. Moreover, the technologies widely used by physical therapists do not offer active temperature monitoring and regulation. Therap-E intends to provide a better alternative for joint therapy than is currently available by providing the user with safer, precision heating and cooling pain-relief therapy at a reasonable price. THE PELTIER EFFECT Design Tradeoffs: Battery Power vs. Wall Power: Wall powered device will provide a more stable platform without a time constraint. It will also be more cost efficient. A battery powered device will have greater portability but with an imposed time constraint. Wrist vs. Knee Brace: A knee brace was decided upon since the market impact is stronger. A wrist brace would require a more flexible design. Cost vs. Duration of Therapy: Peltier devices that are functional for a longer period of time tend to be more expensive. Area of each Peltier device: Increased area of the Peltier devices allows for a greater area of therapy. However, this require better heat dissipation to keep the devices functioning. Unified vs. Individual Peltier Control: Unified Peltier control will drive the same amount of current throughout all devices, based on the average temperature of the enclosed area. Individual Peltier control allows for different amount of current to be passed through each device depending on the local temperature. Analog vs Digital Sensors: Using digital sensors is more reliable but costly compared to analog sensors. Design Constraint: Weight: The enclosure weight may not be more than 3 lbs. in order for it to be usable. Cost: The device cost must be competitive in order for it to be marketable. Safety: The device must have high and low temperature thresholds. HARDWARE DESIGN MeasurementValue Temperature Range50°F - 110°F Duration of TherapyCold: 30 minutes Hot: >2 hours. Power36 W Estimated MSRPUSD $200 Weight2 lbs SPECIFICATIONS Portability- Use of batteries as opposed to wall power. Software implementation of User Interface using a smartphone. Smaller, more numerous Peltier devices. Higher Quality Peltier devices. Addition of light heat sink/ dissipation material. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering ECE 4012 Capstone Design Expo Shafkat Ahnaf Dylan DiGioia Jeffrey Gabriel MOTIVATION The fundamental concept that therap-E takes advantage of is named the Peltier effect. The underlying concept of the Peltier effect is that if a current is passed through the contacts of two dissimilar conductors in a circuit, a temperature differential is created between the two materials. Thus, one of the conductor heats up while the other cools down. Himanshu Pandey Joseph Santilli CODE CONTROL FLOW TRADEOFFS / CONSTRAINTS A Peltier device (pictured right) consists of an array of thermocouples that are pairs of heavily doped p-type (electron deficient) and n-type (excessive electrons) semiconductor elements. The thermocouples are electrically connected in series, but thermally connected in parallel. When a voltage is applied to a Peltier device, some electrons jump to a higher energy state and absorb thermal energy (traveling from p-type to the n-type), causing one side to cool. Some electrons also fall to a lower energy state, releasing thermal energy (traveling from n-type to p-type), causing heat to be released on the other side. Precise temperature control can be achieved by altering the direction and amplitude of this current. FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS 2 3 4 7 8 1 1 5 6 1 2 3 5 4 6 7 8