Micro- and Nano-Technology: A Critical Design Key in Advanced Thermoelectric Cooling Systems

Advanced thermoelectric (TE) cooling technologies are now receiving more research attention, to provide cooling in advanced vehicles and residential systems to assist in increasing overall system energy efficiency and reduce the impact of greenhouse gases from leakage by current R-134a systems. This work explores the systems-related impacts, barriers, and challenges of using micro-technology solutions integrated with advances in nano-scale thermoelectric materials in advanced TE cooling systems. Integrated system-level analyses that simultaneously account for thermal energy transport into and dissipation out of the TE device, environmental effects, temperature- dependent TE and thermo-physical properties, thermal losses, and thermal and electrical contact resistances are presented, to establish accurate optimum system designs using both p-type nanocrystalline-powder-based (NPB) Bi (x) Sb2-x Te-3/n-type Bi2Te3-Bi2Se3 TE systems and conventional p-type Bi2Te3-Sb2Te3/n-type Bi2Te3-Bi2Se3 TE systems. This work established the design trends and identified optimum design regimes and metrics for these types of systems that will minimize system mass, volume, and cost to maximize their commercialization potential in vehicular and residential applications. The relationships between important design metrics, such as coefficient of performance, specific cooling capacity, and cooling heat flux requirements, upper limits, and critical differences in these metrics in p-type NPB Bi (x) Sb2-x Te-3/ n-type Bi2Te3-Bi2Se3 TE systems and p-type Bi2Te3-Sb2Te3/n-type Bi2Te3-Bi2Se3 TE systems, are explored and quantified. Finally, the work discusses the critical role that micro-technologies and nano-technologies can play in enabling miniature TE cooling systems in advanced vehicle and residential applications and gives some key relevant examples.