Finite element analysis and material sensitivity of Peltier thermoelectric cells coolers

Abstract

In this work, a finite element simulation of a commercial thermoelectric cell, working as a cooling heat pump, is presented. The finite element is three-dimensional, non-linear in its formulation (using quadratic temperature-dependence on material properties) and fully coupled, including the Seebeck, Peltier, Thomson and Joule effects. Another special interface finite element is developed to prescribe the electric intensity, taking advantage of repetitions and symmetries. A thorough study of the distributions of voltage, temperature and the corresponding fluxes is presented, and the performance of the cell is compared with those of the manufacturer and simplified analytical formulations, showing a good agreement with the former. Combining the finite element model with the Monte Carlo technique, a Sensitivity Analysis is presented to take into account the performance variables dependence on the material properties, geometrical parameters and prescribed values. This analysis, which can be considered a first step to optimize these devices, concludes that the temperature-dependence of the material properties such as electric conductivity and Seebeck coefficient is very relevant on the cell performance.

Elasto-thermoelectric non-linear, fully coupled, and dynamic finite element analysis of pulsed thermoelectrics

“…1, currently manufactured by [26] and described in [20]. The geometrical model includes, besides the p-Bi 2 T e 3 , copper Cu, alumina Al 2 O 3 and tin-lead solder S nPb materials.…”

“…The TC works as a heat pump, with prescribedT h = 50 • C at the hot face and electric fluxj (or equivalently electric intensityĪ =j A for constant section), see Section 4. An efficient way to prescribe the electric flux in one of the Cu ends is with an 2D, massless interface element described in [20]. At least one of the nodes of the mesh must have the voltage V prescribed, for this article to zero in the right of the upper Cu.…”

“…[30]) are described in [20] in detail and will not be repeated here. The elements are isoparametric hexahedral, and given the particular geometry of the TEs the mesh is structured.…”

“…To fill in part this gap, the authors have developed several complete nonlinear and dynamic formulations for thermoelectricity, [17], [18], [19], elastothermoelectricity [20] and fully coupled "four-field" (including magnetic) in [21]. Also, they are working on a one-dimensional (1D) formulation with beam elements for TEs to study their mechanical response minimizing computation time, [22].…”

Numerical Properties of a Discontinuous Galerkin Fomulation for Electro-Thermal Coupled Problems

“…There has been increased a recent interest in electro-thermal coupling due to its application in energy conversion [3,4,7,8]. The objective of this paper is to extend the DG method to study steady state and response of electro-thermal material model taking into account the Peltier and Seebeck effects.…”