Transient cooling operation of multistage thermoelectric cooler (TEC)

Abstract

A thermoelectric cooler (TEC) is promising as an alternative refrigeration technology for the sake of its inherent advantages; no-moving parts and refrigerant-free in its operation. Due to the compactness, reliability and excellence in temperature stability, TECs have been widely used for small cooling devices. In recent years, thermoelectric devices have been attractive technologies that not only serve the needs of cooling and heating applications but also meet the demand for energy by recycling waste heat. In this research paper, multistage TEC is proposed as a concept of demonstrating the idea of transient cooling technology. The key idea of transient cooling is to harnesses the thermal mass installed at the interfacial level of the stages. By storing heat temporally at the thermal mass, the multistage TEC can readily reach lower temperatures than that by a steady-state operation. The multistage TEC consists of four different sizes of thermoelectric modules and they are operated with an optimized current. Once the cold-part of the uppermost stage is reached at the no-load temperature, the current is successively supplied to the lower stages with a certain time interval; 25, 50 and 75 seconds. The results show the temperatures that can be ultimately reached at the cold-side of the lowermost stage are 197, 182 and 237 K, respectively. It can be concluded that the timing or total amount of the current fed to each thermoelectric module is the key parameter to determine the no-load temperature.