Study of the electro-thermal collaborative cooling based on energy harvesting for thermoelectric coolers

Thermoelectric cooler (TEC) and generator (TEG), as solid devices, are widely used in current thermal management design. In this paper, a TEC-TEG parallel connection collaborative cooling model based on energy harvesting mechanism is proposed to obtain enhanced TEC performance. Firstly, an equation determining electric current flowing through TEC is deduced to abstractly show that its value in collaborative cooling system is higher than typical Peltier cooling system. Then, a corresponding SPICE model with novel TEC-TEG parallel connection structure is proposed to analyze the cooling capacity of different type of TEC. Under the condition of a constant temperature of 300K in the hot side, simulation results show that the increment of current, temperature difference and conversion efficient can be kept in a certain voltage ranges, and the maximum increment of them are about 0.71A, 9.8 degrees C and 8.1%, which demonstrates the proposed model offers a feasible solution to improve the cooling capacity of TEC.