Precise temperature control of electronic devices under ultra-high thermal shock via thermoelectric transient pulse cooling

Abstract

Thermoelectric transient pulse cooling can break through the limitations of thermoelectric material properties and achieve cooling performance beyond steady-state, which has great potential in active thermal management of high-power electronic devices. However, traditional control strategy for thermoelectric cooler (TEC) under steady cooling modes severely limits the widespread application of pulse cooling. This work focused on the key issue of precise temperature control under ultra-high thermal shock, and developed a novel control strategy composed of PID control, transient pulse control, and feed-forward control. By involving the thermoelectric transient pulse cooling effect, TEC can bear much high thermal load, and feed-forward control can further improve the temperature stability. As a result, the new strategy can bear extreme pulse thermal load as high as 4.59 times of the maximum cooling capacity of the TEC in steady-state within width of 20 ms, and the temperature fluctuation can be suppressed to 0.5 K from 7.58 K by using traditional control strategy based on maximum steady-state cooling capacity. This work demonstrates that the control strategy based on transient pulse cooling can greatly improve the capacity and response speed of thermoelectric cooling, providing important reference for precise temperature control of high-power electronic devices.