Abstract
Thermoelectric coolers are attracting significant attention for replacing age-old cooling and refrigeration devices. Localized cooling by wearable thermoelectric coolers will decrease the usage of traditional systems, thereby reducing global warming and providing savings on energy costs. Since human skin as well as ambient air is a poor conductor of heat, wearable thermoelectric coolers operate under huge thermally resistive environment. The external thermal resistances greatly influence thermoelectric material behavior, device design, and device performance, which presents a fundamental challenge in achieving high efficiency for on-body applications. Here, we examine the combined effect of heat source/sink thermal resistances and thermoelectric material properties on thermoelectric cooler performance. Efficient thermoelectric coolers demonstrated here can cool the human skin up to 8.2 °C below the ambient temperature (170% higher cooling than commercial modules). Cost-benefit analysis shows that cooling over material volume for our optimized thermoelectric cooler is 500% higher than that of the commercial modules.
Highlights
Thermoelectric coolers are attracting significant attention for replacing age-old cooling and refrigeration devices
We studied the effect of thermally resistive environment on coefficient of performance (COP), which is illustrated in Supplementary Fig. 2
It was observed that when thermal resistance of the operating environment is small, TE material with higher Seebeck coefficient provides higher cooling capacity and TE material with higher electrical conductivity results in higher COP
Summary
Thermoelectric coolers are attracting significant attention for replacing age-old cooling and refrigeration devices. Since human skin as well as ambient air is a poor conductor of heat, wearable thermoelectric coolers operate under huge thermally resistive environment. The wearable TECs, experience a very low heat load and an extremely high thermally resistive environment This presents a fundamental challenge in achieving high efficiency in TEC modules for on-body applications. The commercial TECs are typically designed to maximize the cooling in a high-heat load (>1 W/cm2) conditions and for low-thermally resistive environment[24,25]. This implies that the currently available commercial TECs might not be the best choice for the wearable cooling devices. While there are several commercial TEC products in the market, their material composition and design are proprietary
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