Theoretical study on an integrated two-stage cascaded thermoelectric module operating with dual power sources

This paper presents an integrated two-stage cascaded thermoelectric module (TTEM) operating with dual power source. The integrated ITEM contains two stages of thermocouples with identical semiconductor cross-sectional area but different leg lengths. An analytical model for the ITEM is developed, and the influences of the key parameters are theoretically investigated. The obtained results indicate that optimum two stage currents combination can maximize both the cooling capacity and coefficient of performance (COP). Furthermore, the leg length allocation ratio for the two stages affects the maximum cooling capacity significantly. Larger leg length proportion of the colder stage may effectively contribute to the improvement in maximum cooling capacity. In addition, there exists an optimum leg length allocation ratio to obtain the corresponding optimum COP when the two stage currents are set to achieve the maximum cooling capacity of the TTEM. However, the total leg length has no effect on the corresponding optimum COP. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.