In this work, we show a general approach for inhomogeneous composite thermoelectric systems, and as an illustrative case, we consider a dual thermoelectric cooler. This composite cooler consists of two thermoelectric modules (TEMs) connected thermally in parallel and electrically in series. Each TEM has different thermoelectric (TE) properties, namely thermal conductance, electrical resistance ...

In thermoelectric coolers (TECs) applied external voltage potential is generated to a temperature difference based on the Peltier effect. Main and basic structure of TECs is in the form of single stage device. Due to the low efficiency, especially low coefficient of performance (COP) of thermoelectric coolers, optimal design of geometrical parameters of such devices is vital. For this purpose, ...

BACKGROUND Product placement influences consumer choices in retail stores. While sugar sweetened beverage (SSB) manufacturers expend considerable effort and resources to determine how product placement may increase SSB purchases, the information is proprietary and not available to the public health and research community. This study aims to quantify the effect of non-SSB product placement in co...

In the present work, we develop a theoretical analysis to minimize the entropy generation of a thermo-electric cooler (TEC), which can be used to cool a processor. We have applied an analysis of first and second law of the Thermodynamics to a TEC. We consider the entropy generation equation as the objective function and the first law as a restriction, in accordance with the variational calculus...

Number of Papers published in peer-reviewed journals: Final Report: STIR: High Performance Thermoelectric Cryo-coolers based on II-VI Low Dimensional Structures Report Title This program performed material design for high-performance thermoelectric (TE) cooler with a figure-of-merit ZT > 3. The cooler is fabricated from HgCdTe using a low dimensional superlattice structure. The TE coolers can o...

A column-type micro thermoelectric cooler is being fabricated using p-type Sb2Te3 and n-type Bi2Te3 films (approximately 4 μm thick). The films are grown by thermal co-evaporation and patterned on Cr/Au/Ti/Pt (hot) connectors, which are deposited onto a silicon dioxide coated wafer. The column height is limited by control of the Te deposition rate. Although a high substrate temperature during t...

In this work, we analyze the thermodynamics and geometric optimization of thermoelectric elements in a hybrid two-stage thermoelectric micro cooler (TEMC). We propose a novel procedure to improve the performance of the micro cooler based on optimum geometric parameters, cross sectional area (A) and length (L), of the semiconductor elements. Our analysis takes into account the Thomson effect to ...