Thermoelectric air-cooling module for electronic devices

This article investigates the thermoelectric air-cooling module for electronic devices. The effects of heat load of heater and input current to thermoelectric cooler are experimentally determined. A theoretical model of thermal analogy network is developed to predict the thermal performance of the thermoelectric air-cooling module. The result shows that the prediction by the model agrees with the experimental data. At a specific heat load, the thermoelectric air-cooling module reaches the best cooling performance at an optimum input current. In this study, the optimum input currents are from 6 A to 7 A at the heat loads from 20 W to 100 W. The result also demonstrates that the thermoelectric air-cooling module performs better performance at a lower heat load. The lowest total temperature difference-heat load ratio is experimentally estimated as -0.54 W K-1 at the low heat load of 20 W, while it is 0.664 W K-1 at the high heat load of 100 W. In some conditions, the thermoelectric air-cooling module performs worse than the air-cooling heat sink only. This article shows the effective operating range in which the cooling performance of the thermoelectric air-cooling module excels that of the air-cooling heat sink only. (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.