Cost-efficient copper-nickel alloy for active cooling applications

Abstract

It is recently proposed that active (Peltier) and passive (conductive) cooling could be combined to design highly-efficient thermal conductors as active heat sinks. We study the potential of low-cost copper-nickel alloys for active cooling applications. We show that for this application, copper-nickel alloys prepared using industrial-grade powders to lower the manufacturing cost, are as good as copper-nickel alloys made out of high purity metals. Furthermore, directed energy deposition, a type of additive manufacturing, can produce copper-nickel alloys which have about 10 percent lower thermoelectric power factor compared to mechanical-alloying methods but have larger thermal conductivity values, hence, possessing similar effective thermal conductivity values, reaching 403 Wm−1K−1at 390K. Much larger values are expected at higher temperatures. The usage of additive manufacturing enables complex geometries and large-scale production.