Experimental Determination of Thermoelectric-Module Parameters and Modeling for Cooling/Heating Control Design

Abstract

Over alternative technologies, the use of thermoelectric modules often provides solutions to many difficult thermal management problems where a low to moderate amount of heat is to be handled by simply regulating input voltage. Mathematical modeling of thermal behaviors with working condition parameters is required for practical cooling/heating control design. The article presents a methodology not only to experimentally determine the parameters of the thermoelectric modules in a few steps of measurement, but also to propose input–output descriptive models, which are a readable representation of nonlinear input–output relations for practical cooling/heating control design under working conditions. In this study, three thermoelectric modules with capacities of 45, 60, and 91.2 W are investigated experimentally as concrete examples. Unknown parameters of those thermoelectric modules, including the Seebeck coefficient, the electrical resistance, and the thermal conductivity are determined for the input–output descriptive models based on measurements. To illustrate effectiveness of the proposed methodology, the input–output descriptive model of a 45-W thermoelectric module is used to describe the actual thermal behaviors of cooling/heating control in real-time implementation. The simulated results have very good agreement with the experimental results.