Journal
JOURNAL OF MATERIALS CHEMISTRY A
Volume 9, Issue 28, Pages 15696-15703Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/d1ta01911b
Keywords
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Funding
- Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Scientific User Facilities Division of the U.S. Department of Energy [DE-AC02-05CH11231]
- Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) - Ministry of Education [2018R1A6A3A03012642]
- National Science Foundation
- National Research Foundation of Korea [2018R1A6A3A03012642] Funding Source: Korea Institute of Science & Technology Information (KISTI), National Science & Technology Information Service (NTIS)
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This paper introduces a lightweight wearable thermoelectric cooler with a flexible heatsink, achieving efficient cooling performance and long cooling capacity. With the optimized ternary composite heatsink, cooling at 5K temperature was achieved under ambient conditions, demonstrating potential applications in real-world scenarios.
In this paper, we propose a lightweight wearable thermoelectric (TE) cooler with a rationally designed flexible heatsink. Heatsinks are commonly designed for use with stationary applications, and are consequently rigid and heavy. These traditional heatsinks are incompatible with wearable applications, which must be durable, mechanically flexible, and lightweight while maintaining performance. This paper presents a flexible heatsink based on a ternary composite of silicone elastomer, phase-change material, and graphite powder; this combination is needed to achieve high flexibility and durability as well as the optimum heat capacity and thermal conductivity. Those factors are key requirements for a heatsink to optimize the cooling performance of a TE cooler and maintain a longer cooling capacity. With our optimized ternary composite flexible heatsink, we achieved a cooling temperature of similar to 5 K at 0.5 W input power and kept cooling for more than 5 h under ambient conditions. On-body testing of the wearable TE cooler with flexible heatsink was also performed to demonstrate potential applications in the real-world. Our work provides fundamental insights to designing wearable TE devices and paves the way for innovative solutions for on-body thermal management applications such as clothing, hats, seat cushions, and other portable devices.
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