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Thermoelectric cooling uses the Peltier effect to create a heat flux at the junction of two different types of materials. A Peltier cooler, heater, or thermoelectric heat pump is a solid-state active heat pump which transfers heat from one side of the device to the other, with consumption of electrical energy, depending on the direction of the current.
A typical Peltier heat pump involves multiple junctions in series, through which a current is driven. Some of the junctions lose heat due to the Peltier effect, while others gain heat. Thermoelectric heat pumps exploit this phenomenon, as do thermoelectric cooling devices found in refrigerators.
This effect is commonly used for cooling electronic components and small instruments. In practice, many such junctions may be arranged in series to increase the effect to the amount of heating or cooling required. There are no moving parts, so a Peltier plate is maintenance free. It has a relatively low efficiency, so thermoelectric cooling is ...
The efficiency of a thermoelectric device for electricity generation is given by , defined as =.. The maximum efficiency of a thermoelectric device is typically described in terms of its device figure of merit where the maximum device efficiency is approximately given by [7] = + ¯ + ¯ +, where is the fixed temperature at the hot junction, is the fixed temperature at the surface being cooled ...
The typical efficiency of TEGs is around 5–8%, although it can be higher. Older devices used bimetallic junctions and were bulky. More recent devices use highly doped semiconductors made from bismuth telluride (Bi 2 Te 3), lead telluride (PbTe), [10] calcium manganese oxide (Ca 2 Mn 3 O 8), [11] [12] or combinations thereof, [13] depending on application temperature.
Peltier coolers are often used where a traditional vapor-compression cycle refrigerator would be impractical or take up too much space, and in cooled image sensors as an easy, compact and lightweight, if inefficient, way to achieve very low temperatures, using two or more stage peltier coolers arranged in a cascade refrigeration configuration ...
The Peltier effect is the presence of heating or cooling at an electrified junction of two different conductors (1834). [7] His great experimental discovery was the heating or cooling of the junctions in a heterogeneous circuit of metals according to the direction in which an electric current is made to pass round the circuit.
A two stage Peltier cooler can achieve around -30°C, -75°C with three stages, -85°C with four stages, -100°C with six stages, and -123°C with seven stages. Refrigeration power and efficiency are low but Peltier coolers can be small, for small cooling loads resulting in overall low power consumption for a Peltier cooler with three stages.