Preliminary Research On Minitype Thermoelectric Refrigerator And Semiconductor Thermoelectric Generator

The thermoelectric effect, discovered more than 150 years ago, had been less applied in practical fields during more than 100 years because of its inefficiency. Until 1950's with the discovery of high performance materials, thermoelectric technology was developed rapidly and began to be applied in engineering fields. According to different thermoelectric effects, thermoelectric technology had two branches which were thermoelectric generation and thermoelectric cooling or heating. Because of many unique advantages, such as compact structure, no moving parts, no pollution, precise control, thermoelectric cooling or heating systems had been paid more and more attations with the developments of technology and the application fields had been persistently developed, while the thermoelectric generation technology developed more slowly and was just applied in spaceflight and military affairs. And the key technology of thermoelectric generation was grasped by developed countries, such as American, Japan and some European countries, while it was still at an initial stage in domestic. Based on analyzing the bottlenecks of thermoelectric technology in application, studies was made about two aspects, the thermoelectric generation and thermoelectric cooling or heating.Firstly, the performance parameters and their calculation formulas were given based on the theoretical derivation,and the exergy of thermoelectric was put forward for evaluating the performance of thermoelectric device furtherly. And then an experiment platform, based on the application in future was built for testing thermoelectric chip performance. Tests for a novel kind of micro thermoelectric generation module were carried out. The variation regularity for temperature of hot side and cool side of the module, recirculating water flow rate and temperature and performance of the module (electromotive force, output power, intermal resistence and Volt-ampere Characteristic) were deduced by analyzing results of tests.Secondly, the calculation formulas of thermoelectric regfregerating capacity and efficiency were given based on the theoretical derivation. At the same time, the optimum characteristics were analyzed. Experiments were carried out for measuring the regfregerating capacity. The variation regularity of cooling capacity, which could guide the application and design, was detrived based on experimental results when changing the voltage of the chip and heat emission intensity on hot side. Finally, prospects, which were based on study about thermoelectric material, the device and the coupling application of thermoelectric generation and cooling, were performed.