Cascading of Peltier Couples for Thermoelectric Cooling

Abstract

The cooling of a single thermoelectric junction is limited to a certain temperature difference by the inherent properties of the elements used. Altenkirch gave a theoretical treatment of the single couple and showed a way to overcome the limitation on cooling by using a number of thermocouples in thermal cascade. Such an arrangement was constructed by Turrettini and shown to work. A simplified form of Altenkirch's theory is presented and a form of cascade which is simpler and more efficient than that of Turettini is described and experimental results are given. A two-stage cascade of elements limited to 11°C cooling as a single couple reached 15°C cooling while rather heavily loaded by lack of adequate thermal insulation. A good agreement with theory is obtained for the behavior of this cascade. It is shown that such a cascade is in theory more efficient than a single couple under all circumstances.

Thermoelectric power generation

“…15. 47 In this configuration, couples fabricated from different materials are arranged thermally in series and electrically insulated from one another. The second stage of thermocouples uses heat rejected from the first stage, and so on.…”

Three-Stage Thin-Film Superlattice Thermoelectric Multistage Microcoolers with a ΔT max of 102 K

“…This concept was originally proposed by OÕBrien et al 4 Figure 5a shows a diagram of the concept, while Fig. 5b shows a photograph of the completed three-stage device.…”

Foreword re C. S. Wallace

“…Indeed, without being too facetious, it is no great stretch to imagine hardware to whose design Wallace contributed (e.g., the University of Illinois's ILLIAC [250,251,252,253,254] 23 , the University of Sydney's SILLIAC [247] 24 , or something more recent) -including several Wallace multiplier chips [254,256] -cooled thermoelectrically or thermomagnetically by a thermocouple (if the esky 25 machine were big enough) to whose design Wallace contributed [182,181] running a secure operating system to whose design Wallace contributed testing any number of Wallace-designed pieces of MML software (dating back as far as 1968, and which are far from unknown to out-perform all other [contemporaneously] known methods) 26 using any number of Wallace-designed physically or pseudo-random number 10 this is perhaps [324]. For more on Chris's and his students' contributions to operating systems, see [49].…”

“…For further relevance to "intelligent systems", see also text surrounding footnote 179 (and perhaps also footnote 203 and text leading to it). 17 see especially Chris Wallace's (posthumous) MML book [287] and also, e.g., [102,64,65,233,114,240] and text in and near footnotes 62 to 65 18 see, e.g., [300, [176] for a correction using MML to what was otherwise one of the few more viable and coherent purported criticisms of Occam's razor -perhaps see also footnote 182).…”

“…However, it is a shortcoming in the current author that this immediate past sentence fails to mention Chris's work on data processing in the early cosmic ray experiments in Sydney [45,40], one of his papers that can cause some mirth [167], his analysis of nasal support [59], his direct contributions to computer science course structure, syllabi and education 27 , and vastly many other works. I have tried to cite them below -from 28 29 his first works [182,181] helping a fellow (1954) Honours student (Brian O'Brien 30 ) to get his project to work, to his last work published while he was alive [217] to his posthumously published book on MML [287] and the only other two works of his to date that have appeared posthumously [151,293] -and 31 I have also endeavoured to list them at www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld/CSWallacePublications.…”