Food items, medicines and other perishables are considerably sensitive to temperature and environmental conditions. Storage and transportation of these items without affecting their quality is one of the acute challenges all over the world. The method of refrigeration is used to keep these items below atmospheric temperature. It is an energy intensive process and to meet these energy requirements, electric power is commonly used. As the electricity crisis and prices are increasing day by day, it has established a thought provoking ideology to utilize solar energy for refrigeration processes and improving their performance in this regard.

Photovoltaic Powered Thermoelectric Refrigerator is a special type of refrigerator which uses solar energy instead of conventional electrical energy and is based on the principles Peltier effect to create a cold side and a hot side. The cold side of the module is used for the cooling of refrigerator space while the heat from the hot side is rejected to ambient by using heat sinks and fans. The present work for the experimentation of Solar Thermoelectric Refrigeration unit was carried out at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Engineering & Technology Lahore-Pakistan at KSK Campus. The results showed that at an ambient temperature below that of 25ºC, the unit could maintain the temperature in the refrigerator space at about 0ºC. The maximum COP recorded was about 0.65. It has been further analyzed that the temperature gradient of hot and cold sides of the thermoelectric module and solar irradiance greatly affects the system performance. An optimum value of solar insolation rate let the cooling production and COP to achieve maximum value. The refrigerator would be potential for cold storage in remote and outdoor conditions where electric power supply is absent. It has the advantages of being portable, small, reliable, lightweight, noiseless and low cost in mass production.