Estimating the Impact of a Recuperative Approach on the Efficiency of Thermoelectric Cooling
Sustainability 2024
Vilnis Jurķāns, Juris Blūms

Thermoelectric cooling is a prospective technology that has a lot of advantages; however, its main drawback is its low efficiency compared to other technologies. A lot of scientific research is aimed at the improvement of the efficiency of thermoelectric cooling, including the development of new thermoelectric materials, innovative structures, and better power management strategies. The present work further explores a self-developed recuperative power management approach, which takes advantage of the thermoelectric element’s ability to work as an electrical generator. This study relied on the thermal–electrical analogy method to develop a model that is capable of describing the impact of recuperation on the cooling performance while preserving the simplest configuration possible. The influence of different variables was estimated by three suggested quantities for evaluating the gains, losses, and rationality of the recuperative approach. A recovery of up to 10% of the electrical energy supplied to the thermoelectric element was observed experimentally. The ratio between the recovered energy and induced heat losses did not exceed a factor of 0.9. It is concluded that the recuperation process is reasonable only in the case of unavoidable interruption of the cooling process when average-performance thermoelectric elements are used.


Keywords
thermoelectric; cooling efficiency; Peltier effect; Seebeck effect; recuperation; thermal–electrical analogy method
DOI
10.3390/su16125206
Hyperlink
https://www.mdpi.com/2835590

Jurķāns, V., Blūms, J. Estimating the Impact of a Recuperative Approach on the Efficiency of Thermoelectric Cooling. Sustainability, 2024, Vol. 16, No. 5206, pp.1-19. ISSN 2071-1050. Available from: doi:10.3390/su16125206

Publication language
English (en)
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