An Enhanced Thermoelectric Collaborative Cooling System With Thermoelectric Generator Serving as a Supplementary Power Source

Thermoelectric coolers (TECs) are widely used in state-of-the-art thermal management systems. Recently, there is a big trend to power TECs using thermoelectric generators (TEGs). Mainstream research efforts focus on attaining a higher figure of merit (ZT) of thermoelectric material, which now faces a great challenge. Alternatively, this article proposes a different approach to improve the performance of TEC, that is, integration of a TEG with a TEC. The TEG converts the collected heat energy into electric current, which reduces the power consumption and enhances the cooling capacity of the TEC. Using different methods of connecting the TEC and TEG, two thermoelectric collaborative cooling systems are proposed. Accurate SPICE models of the two cooling systems are established. The experimental results demonstrate that the discrepancy between the currents flowing through the TEC in the experiments and in the SPICE models is less than 4.8% on average. Based on the verified SPICE models, the proposed TEC-TEG collaborative cooling systems are assessed in terms of power consumption, cooling capacity, coefficient of performance, and cooling efficiency. Compared with a typical Peltier cooling system, the two collaborative cooling systems achieve significant performance improvements.