Investigation of Performance Estimation Methods Validity of Thermoelectric Module

Abstract

The thermoelectric cooling system is now widely used in small-capacity applications. This system is designed to remove the heat by using a thermoelectric module thus the selected object can be maintained at the required range of temperature. The performance of the thermoelectric module system can be estimated by using the information from the technical datasheet issued by the manufacturer. Two commonly used methods for estimating the cooling capacity of the system are performance curve and energy balance. This study aims to investigate the accuracy of those two methods compared with the experimental results. The experiment was performed by maintaining the hot side temperature at 50 °C. To estimate the cooling capacity, the heat conduction on the stainless-steel block was calculated. The results showed the estimated cooling capacity of the thermoelectric system was up to 48% and 10.1% higher than the experimental result by using energy balance and performance curve methods, respectively. It implied that the performance curve method is more accurate than the energy balance method.