Heat sinks are a device which is used to dissipate heat of electronic elements in electrical appliances. There are many kinds of heat sink materials. The following describes are about the aluminum, copper and combinative radiation fins of copper and aluminum.(more)

Although the two cooling systems comply with the same thermal dynamics, a TEC has many obvious advantages: simple structure, small volume, light weight, high reliability, long service lifetime, no noise, small power consumption, low cost and so on. What’s more, there is no need for TECs to fill chemical consumables, which the mechanical cooling method needs. Because of no moving parts, there is no wear and tear for TECs. Thus TEC is an ideal cooling method, which can gradually take the place of the mechanical cooling method when cooling many components (such as CCD).(more)

In practical applications, TEC can sustain work through continuous heat change of heat exchanger and cold and heat source. When the system works, the heat density of cold and hot ends can be up to 104W/m2, so effective operation is strongly dependent on heat transfer performance of cold and hot end. The heat dissipation of the cold end is more important than the hot end’s. Suppose the heat dissipating capacity of the cold end is q1, the heat dissipating capacity of hot end is q2 and the electric power consumption of the system is w0. After the TEC is connected to a power supply, the cold end continuously absorbs q1, which is cooling capacity. This part of the heat and electro-thermal consumption need to be dissipated from the hot end together, which can ensure the normal work of TEC and make TEC play an effective role.(more)

In this paper, the air cooling method of TEC is mainly introduced.(more)

In thermo-electric cooling system, the installation of TECs is very critical. Basic principles should be abided by during installation, or it may result in bad performance and reliability. There are a few factors to be considered in designing and installing the thermo-electric cooling system, as below.(more)

In general, selecting the size of TECs depends on the area of chips, but not bigger than that. Additionally, TEC has a certain thickness, which is put between chip and heat sink. If it is too thick, it will be hard to fix.(more)

In some specified applications, the main method is to use a special high thermal conductive epoxy resin binder. Since the coefficients of thermal expansion of the ceramics of TECs, heat sink and the cooled object, it's not recommended to use epoxy resin binder in large TECs. The detailed steps are as follows:(more)

When a material is melting, it will absorb the heat from the hot end of thermopile in the isothermal condition. The isothermal characteristic is the necessary condition of maintaining the cold end constant. The time for the melting stage is the temperature constant time of the cold end.(more)

CPU of computer is a high density heating element. Based on the cooling principle of thermoelectric cooler (TEC), the cold end of TEC is in contact with the display chip and the hot end is in contact with the heat sink. When connecting a power supply, the temperature difference of the cold and hot end will come out and moves from the cold end to the hot end through lattice energy. Only if the hot end heat can be dissipated effectively, the cold end will be cooling constantly and the cooling effect will be pretty good. In fact, TEC is a heat pump, which can transfer the heat from chips to heat sinks, so only if the heat of the TEC hot end is being dissipated continually, the cold end can be cooling and the display chips can be in a relatively constant temperature state. However, in the hot end of TEC, the heat sink and fan are still needed. In the process of using TEC, there are some other points to consider.(more)

The material figure of merit Z is an important parameter to measure the cooling capacity of TEC and its expression is. In order to improve Z value, conductivity σ and Seebeck coefficient α should be improved and thermal conductivity λ should be reduced. λ consists of phonon thermal conductivity λp (about 90%) and electronic conductivity λe. These three parameters are not independent of each other, which all are the function of carrier concentration n and temperature T. In the condition of different environment temperature, the value of Z is different. In general, the dimensionless factor ZT is used to describe material’s performance. Bi2Te3 is the most widely used thermoelectric material and the value of ZT can be up to 0.9. However, the cooling efficiency of TEC made by Bi2Te3is only 30% of compression refrigeration.(more)