BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Sleeping bags are generally designed to keep a human's body temperature within a sleeping bag at a consistently comfortable level during a time in which a human sleeps or rests in it. This attempt to keep a user consistently comfortable during resting is challenging in that the body heat tends to increase an interior temperature during sleep as well as occurrences of wide variations in outdoor temperatures during different seasons, which can vary from one hour to the next over a single sleeping period.

Therefore, the sleeping bag user may experience an uncomfortably high temperature during summertime outings or in other hot environment, or uncomfortably low interior temperature during the winter outing or in another cold weather environment.

Moreover, in order to withstand external elements sleeping bags are made with waterproof/airtight fabrics that make an interior natural heat exchange with external air difficult or almost impossible.

An ideal sleeping bag to keep humans sufficiently comfortable throughout a period of sleep would be a bag with an adjustable interior air temperature controlled by a user so as to accommodate external temperature changes, body heat variations, and personal preferences.

Thus, there is a need for a sleeping bag or a comforter, with air circulating properties that can be adjusted in accordance with personal preferences relative to an external weather environment.

Cooling and heating properties of solid state devices based on Peltier effect are the best to use for this purpose and are well known and widely used in scientific and industrial applications. There are several patents that describe attempts to use this effect to create a personal comfort environment, most of them using different wearable garments. For example, US Patent Application No. 20150237927 of Nelson describes “body envelopment for receiving the body of a user”, which is essentially a set of Peltier elements located at different areas of human body.

In U.S. Pat. No. 8,397,517 to Monk, an air conditioning system for a motorcycle rider is presented, that uses a liquid heat exchanger based on Peltier effect to cool or heat up a garment wearer.

U.S. Pat. No. 10,842,205 to Lee describes the apparel thermo-regulatory system that actively heats or cools a wearer. In this system the Peltier elements are essentially weaved in the fabric that the user wears.

U.S. Pat. No. 10,299,525 to Buckman discloses a “heating or cooling unit stored in a backpack” in which the air blown by a fan is used for cooling or heating a helmet worn by the user.

U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,650,886 and 8,616,226 to Wilcoxon describe heat sinks with “a plurality of mechanically rigid tubing sections configured for being in thermal contact with the heat source and the heat sink.” In this invention “The liquid is configured for being circulated within the loop for promoting transfer of thermal energy from the heat source to the heat sink via the loop.”

It is therefore clear that currently available applications for portable versions of air conditioning cannot provide required performance applicable for sleeping bags users. Thus, it would be desirable to provide a method for cooling or heating a sleeping bag interior as well as a sleeping bag provided with corresponding means which eliminate the disadvantages of currently available sleeping bags.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method for creating a comfortable environment for sleeping bag users, such as campers and tourists, which includes transfer of a cooled or heated air from an external heat exchanger that produces the hot or cold air via inlet and outlet couplings using flexible air hoses connected to the inlet and outlet couplings on the bag arranged in an outer airtight layer of the sleeping bag, both the inlet and outlet couplings been separable from the external heat exchanger providing an optional usage of the sleeping bag without an air conditioning system.

In the second aspect of this invention the method utilizes a closed loop sleeping bag ventilation system comprised of an interior space of the sleeping bag, an inlet coupling that has an opening into the interior space of the sleeping bag, and an outlet coupling that has an opening to the interior of the sleeping bag, providing an air circulation through the interior space and allowing used air to escape from the interior space through the outlet coupling and to be directed to the external heat exchanger for reuse to increase a system efficiency.

In the third aspect of this invention the method includes an addition of a regulated inlet provided for allowing a fresh external air to be mixed with a circulating air in a controllable amount.

According to the forth aspect of this invention a heating/cooling system for a sleeping bag user is provided, including a sleeping bag adapted to heat or to cool a sleeping bag user, and provided with an interior space created by an outer airtight thermally insulated layer and optional internal air permeable fabric and allowing an incoming air to freely circulate through the interior of the sleeping bag, and the sleeping bag is provided with an inlet coupling having an opening into the interior space of the sleeping bag and an outlet coupling with an opening into the interior space of the said bag, thermo-electric devices located externally and in the proximity to the sleeping bag and adapted to be electrically coupled to a source of direct current from a power supply, and having a first face exposed to an open air and a second face exposed to an air tunnel for operatively transferring heat using a set of Peltier elements from a first face to a second face or vice-versa depending upon a sense of the direct current.

The first face is thermally coupled to a thermally conductive element(s) (a heat sink(s)) exposed to atmosphere, and the second face being thermally coupled to a thermally conductive element (a heat sink) adapted to pass in a heat exchange relation a cooled or warmed up air inside of the air tunnel to atmosphere, wherein the air is directed to the inlet coupling in the sleeping bag via one air hose and returned from the sleeping bag outlet coupling to the heat exchanger via another air hose before passing again through the heat exchanger back to the inlet coupling in the said bag in a closed loop manner creating a closed loop air conditioning system for the interior space of the sleeping bag.

The system comprises the air space between inner air permeable layer and outer airtight layer of the sleeping bag, connections for circulating a working air from the outlet coupling of the bag to and through the thermally conductive element(s) (the heat sink(s)) of the Peltier thermal unit and back to the inlet coupling on the sleeping bag. Also, a fan is mounted on the Peltier heat exchange unit and adapted to cause a passage of reused air past the heat sink in a heat exchange relation therewith.

Preferably each of the sleeping bag outlets has a female interface and is connected to the heat exchanger via flexible air hoses provided with male interfaces at each coupling that fits snugly with the sleeping bag and heat exchanger outlets. Similarly, the heat exchanger has similar female interfaces that fit snugly with mail interface fitted to the other end of the air hoses. The outlet interface of the heat exchanger has additional short outlet opened to the external air with a passage controlled by using an adjustable damper, or a mechanically variable diaphragm, or a set of covers with different diameter holes in it, or any other means that allow to change a mixture of the fresh and recirculated air in the air stream coming into the heat exchanger from the sleeping bag. In the preferred embodiment all orifices have covers to prevent any foreign matter ingress.

While the user can simply turn the system on or off by using the switch on the heat exchanger, the system in the preferred embodiment is outfitted with a remote control module that can use a Bluetooth protocol to send commands to a corresponding Bluetooth receiver and a microcontroller in a Peltier power supply to increase or decrease the air temperature by changing the current through the Peltier elements, or change the airflow by controlling a fan voltage and to keep the bag interior in a comfortable zone.

