Fuzzy logic controlled thermoelectric brain cooler

Death and disability caused by traffic accidents is a major problem all over the world. To protect brain during a heart attack is one of the major problems as well. It is also important to protect the brain during open heart surgery as the brain is very likely to have the ischemic damage. Cranial-Cerebral Hypothermia(CCH) is commonly used for protection and the therapy of the brain. Hypothermia reduces oxygen consumption of tissues and hence protects organism and especially the brain against deathly effect of hypoxic. The traditional methods to generate hypothermia by cooling the head externally such as placing the head inside cold water, or placing ice on head are quite primitive, unpractical and inefficient. In this study, performance of a recently designed thermoelectric helmet was designed which consists of thermoelectric modules in order to supply brain hypothermia. It was checked by the method of fuzzy logic which is one of the control tehchnics of artificial intelliegence. Thermoelectric cooling systems is a technology which do not contain harmfull gases. Which operates by direct current and provides the opportunity of electronical control. By changing direction of the current it can easily shift between heating and cooling regimes.The current control of the helmet was built by full bridge circuit. PIC 18F4520 microcontroller was used for the control of driver circuit which was designed with IGBT switching elements. It was checked using the outputs of the pulse width modulation of the microcontroller(PWM).The measured tempratures, current and voltage values on serial port, Were transfarred to a interface which was designed with Visual Basic program and recorded on database. The software in microcontroller was written by CCS C.With the designed system, the temparature of the helmet was brought to desired level very fast and correctly. Much better results were obtained when compared to those primitive and unpractical methods.