Design and application of a cooling device based on peltier effect coupled with electrohydrodynamics

Abstract

Miniaturization has become the development trend of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which results in a significant increase in heat flux production and operating temperature. The accumulated heat should be dissipated effectively to ensure that the chip can work properly. The conventional cooling techniques have now reached their limits in heat removal rates. A new cooling device coupled thermoelectric cooling (TEC) with corona wind cooling (CWC) was proposed and optimized experimentally based on the second law of thermodynamics and the principle of entropy generation minimization. The results indicate that a better cooling effect and a high coefficient of performance value is obtained by turning on the TEC near the heat source firstly and adjusting the CWC power at the hot side. Increasing the input power of TEC and keeping the total cooling power unchanged, another 4.7% improvement is obtained with the highest heating power of 14 W. The target temperature can be maintained at an acceptable level (＜80 °C) if the TEC and CWC are well coupled. However, the coupling effect between TEC and CWC will be worse when the input power is large. A higher output luminous flux will be obtained when the LED chip works in the constant current mode due to the good coupling between CWC and TEC. The luminescence intensity and chromaticity properties are improved significantly. The principal component analysis (PCA) also indicates excellent comprehensive performance. The results verify the feasibility of a novel cooling device coupled TEC with CWC in cooling high heat flux electronics.