Making a laptop cooler with a peltier?

Hey guys, I am about to start construction on a laptop cooler that incorporates a peltier device to allow for even cooler temperatures. Any thing to consider other than the obvious condensation issue with extreme temp differences?

 

Good god, good luck with that.

 

My experience with peltiers is only on the CPU as a cooler, but I would imagine the concepts of heat transfer are the same.. I am not sure how large of a peltier you plan to use, but i would imagine it needs to be substantially larger than the little ones they are putting in the USB drink "coolers".

A couple things I recall from my use of them:
1. they required dedicated power. I had a seperate power supply for the device aside from the PSU that ran the comp
2. Where there is cold, there is also heat. Using it on a CPU is easy since the cold side faces the CPU and you have a heat sink and airflow to dissapate the heat generated from the other side of the device. If you are generating a serious amount of cooling on the laptop side of your cooler, you are creating at least the inverse value of heat on the underside of your cooler. You would need a serious amount of copper (or some other heat conductor) to capture the heat and then sufficient airflow to pull it off the copper. If you dont do this well, you are going to have some toasty legs.
3. Condensation. Similar to the concept of a cold water glass or an AC unit, the cold side of the peltier can collect condensation. In a desktop, I was able to combat this by making a seal with the CPU and properly insulating the area around it. Whether you leave the cold side of the peltier exposed or have it touching a copper plate, if it gets cold, it can collect moisture.

If you have thought of these things alredy, then right on and I hope you have plans to get around this stuff. Like i said, I used them only in desktop PCs and I dont how far the technology has progressed since I used it. Good luck!

 

I plan on using a 100W peltier but running it at about 10W or so. I plan on attaching the cold side to a metal panel right below the laptop and have a small fan blowing some air through metal slits on the cold panel into the CPU GPU side. The bottom will consist of another metal panel acting as a large heat sink with a small fan blowing air across it. The two panels would obviously be insulated and will be running on a 12V supply powering the peltier and fans. I don't think that condensation would be an issue running at around 10W. I am thinking that this whole cooler will be about 1in thick.