Thermal-Electrical Transport Characteristics And Structure Optimization Study Of Thermoelectric Coolers

With the improvement of technology and living standards,people have put forward higher requirements for temperature control,hoping to find a clean,accurate and fast cooling method.Thermoelectric cooling technology has been widely researched and applied by its unique advantages of small size,no moving parts,fast response,small pollution,wide application range and so on.However,it is also constrained by shortcomings such as insufficient cooling capacity and low COP.Under the circumstances that thermoelectric materials have not yet achieved a breakthrough,structural optimization of conventional thermoelectric coolers has become an effective method to improve performance.Under this background,an L-shaped thermoelectric leg structure was proposed to improve the performance of the thermoelectric cooler,and the performance and performance influencing factors of the L-shaped thermoelectric cooler were analyzed.In this paper,the multiphysics model of the thermoelectric cooler is established and the energy balance equation is analyzed.This thesis discusses the performance influencing factors of the thermoelectric cooler and the L-shaped thermoelectric leg is proposed through structural adjustment and optimization.The finite element method was used to analyze the effect of the height of thermoelectric leg,cross-sectional area of thermoelectric leg,height of hot-end copper sheet and thickness of hot-end copper sheet on the thermal-electrical transport flux,thermal-electrical transport path and maximum cooling flux,and the appropriate structure size was selected.The steady-state performance,starting characteristics and supercooling characteristics of L-shaped thermoelectric cooler is further researched and compared with the traditional thermoelectric cooler.The advantages and characteristics of the L-shaped thermoelectric cooler is analyzed.It is found that to get better performance of the conventional thermoelectric cooler,the small height of the thermoelectric leg should be used.The L-shaped thermoelectric leg structure could change the thermal-electrical transport path in the thermoelectric leg to Lshaped,significantly reducing the flow length and making the L-shaped thermoelectric cooler obtain performance close to thin-film thermoelectric cooler.Under the premise of processing using traditional technology,the maximum cooling flux of the L-shaped thermoelectric cooler can be increased by 76.30% compared with the optimal design of the conventional Π-shaped thermoelectric cooler.In comparison with the performance of the same size Π-shaped thermoelectric cooler,the maximum cooling flux and COP of the Lshaped thermoelectric cooler are significantly improved,and it can get better performance under different input currents,cold end load,and hot end heat exchange conditions.At the same time its startup time can be reduced by 58.78%.The supercooling performance of the L-shaped thermoelectric cooler has a significant advantage,which is manifested in the larger supercooling temperature drop,the smaller the superheating temperature rise,and the faster speed to reach the coldest minimum temperature.This study provides a new idea for the structural optimization design of thermoelectric coolers.