Theoretical and Experimental Investigation of Thermoelectric cooling module
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Chang, Yu-Wei
Abstract
Owing to the growth of electronic manufacture and the requirement for electronic product performance, micro-chip is produced in small size with powerful performance, which causes serious electronic cooling problem. Among nowadays electronic cooling solutions, air-cooling is the most popular. In air-cooling solution, heat is conducted through heat sink and then released into air by forced convection. Nevertheless, air-cooling solution counters its performance limit in recent years. It is no longer the cooling solution for next generation micro-chips. Therefore, a lot of pioneers dedicate in developing new cooling technologies, and thermoelectric cooling is one of them. Thermoelectric cooling employs Peltier effect, which is caused by input electric current, to lower heat source temperature. Firstly, this thesis theoretically analyzes thermoelectric cooler and develops an experimental method to measure the physical properties. This thesis, then, integrates thermoelectric cooler with different heat sinks as thermoelectric cooling modules. Those heat sinks are air-cooling heat sink, water-cooling module, heat pipe embedded heat sink, and vapor chamber heat sink. The impacts of heating power and input electric current on thermal performance are experimentally and theoretically studied. Furthermore, this investigation figures out the effective operating range under which the performance of heat sink with thermoelectric cooler can be better than without thermoelectric cooler. Besides, this study proposes numerical model of thermoelectric cooler for CFD commercial package. The model could be an aid for simulation involving thermoelectric cooler. he result shows that the temperature difference between thermoelectric sides must be less than 10oC to achieve the COP larger than one. The total thermal resistance of thermoelectric cooling module increases with increasing heating power at a specific input current. An optimal input current exists for lowest total thermal resistance under every heating power. In this study, the optimal input currents of thermoelectric cooling modules are 6-7A. Being integrated with thermoelectric cooler does not guarantee the performance improvement of heat sink. There exists maximal heating power over which heat sinks perform worse when integrated with thermoelectric cooler. In this investigation, the maximal heating power is 57W for air-cooling, 57W for water-cooling, 58W for vapor chamber, and 60W for heat pipe embedded heat sink when the heating area is 30 mm square. Furthermore, this thesis develops a theoretical analysis model, and the prediction by the model matches the experimental result. And also, the simulation result by the proposed numerical model highly matches the prediction by the theoretical model.
Subjects
thermoelectric cooling
thermal resistance model
electronic cooling
numerical simulation
Type
thesis
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