Enhancement of thermoelectric cooling by hot-end electroluminescence

Abstract

Thermoelectric cooling devices have broad application prospects, in which the Peltier effect plays a central role. However, the increase of Peltier coefficient not only increases the heat absorption at the cold end, but also increases the heat release at the hot end, resulting in insufficient utilization of the cooling capacity of the device. In this paper, the hot end of thermoelectric cooling device is designed as a double heterostructure semiconductor structure, so that the energy of the hot end is released in the form of photons, thereby reducing the heating of the hot end and improving the cooling capacity of the device. Based on the above ideas, we designed a single-arm device and a π-type device, and studied the influence of electricity-to-light conversion efficiency, current and arm length on the minimum cooling temperature and cooling power density of the device through numerical simulation. The correctness of simulation results is verified by solving the analytical solution of single-arm device. The results show that by releasing the energy of the hot end in the form of photons, the minimum cooling temperature of the device can be significantly reduced, the cooling power density and the cooling capacity of the device can be improved.