An Experimental and Theoretical Study of Forced Convection from a Peltier Thermo-electric Cooling

Abstract

An experimental and theoretical study for heat transfer through thermoelectric cooling system in this paper was presented. An experimental work was conducted to evaluate the performance of a thermoelectric module fitted to a sun flower heat sink with a similar sized heat source. The experimental investigation was done to evaluate the effect of TE input voltage, flow rates of cooling air and heat source (heating element) power input on the performance of a thermoelectric cooling system. Four low heating load (1.7, 2.4, 3.6 and 5 W) were used and hot side was fitted to a sunflower heat sink with forced convection. Experimental results show that the increasing of cooling air flow rates improves system performance, while increasing in applied TE voltage leads to deterioration it. The COPmax obtained is about 4.7 at 2V TE voltages and 5W heating load, and then decreased sharply as voltage further increased and reaches 0.13 at 12V. The results of the current study show that all Thermo-electric Cooling system recorded temperatures increase with increasing in heating load at a constant TE voltage and air flow rate. In addition to that the Tc decreases and Th increases with the increment of input voltage and that can lead to increase of the air temperature passing over heat sink. TE performance is highly affected by air flow rate. The theoretical result validated experimentally and shows an acceptable agreement between them.