Experimental and numerical study on thermoelectric liquid cooling module performance with different heat sink configurations

In the present study, the cooling performance of thermoelectric cooling module with different heat sink configurations has been investigated. In experiments, 0.015 kg/s cold water flow rate and hot water temperature are test in the range of 32-50 degrees C. Effects of heat sink configurations and hot side temperature on cooling performance of the thermoelectric cooling module are considered. For numerical study, a three-dimensional single-phase flow model is used to analyze the heat transfer and flow characteristics of the problem. The predicted results are verified with the measured data and good agreement is obtained. It can be found that the heat sink configurations have a significant effect on the velocity and temperature distributions of coolant which results in cooling performance of thermoelectric cooling module. The heat sink model C gives the highest cooling performance as compared with others models. While the higher hot water temperature results in increasing temperature different between hot and cold sides of thermoelectric plate. Therefore, cooling performance tends to decrease with increasing hot water temperature. The results from this study are expected to lead to guidelines that will allow designing the thermoelectric cooling module embedded with the heat sink to maximize cooling performance.