Computer Simulation Study of the Thermoelectric Cooling by Hybrid Method

하이브리드법을 이용한 열전냉각의 수치해석 연구

The purpose of this study is to minimize the heat transfer surface area and cold fluid exit temperature of heat exchanger which applied to the refrigeration and air-conditioning system by utilizing the thermoelectric principle. Both uniform and non-uniform current distribution methods which applied to the analysis of the TE elements that incorporates heat exchanger were investigated. The non-uniform current distribution method had the better coefficient of performance and had the lower cold fluid exit temperature of the TE cooling system than the uniform current distribution method. It was found that if a TE cooling system incorporates a heat exchanger, a non-uniform current distribution should guarantee to the lowest cold fluid exit temperature. Also, the hybrid method (combination of the uniform and non-uniform current distribution method) is investigated to achieve the best results by combining the uniform and non-uniform current distributions. The results show that it can lower the cold fluid exit temperature and reduce the heat transfer surface area for the parallel flow arrangement if we apply the constant current in some entry region and the non-uniform increasing current in the direction of the cold fluid flow afterwards.