Application of Thermoelectric-Adsorption Cooler for Harsh Environment Electronics Under Varying Heat Load

Abstract

Incorporation of a thermoelectric (TE) device for heat regeneration and recovery can help realize adsorption systems that would be compact enough to fit inside electronic enclosures. Such a cooling system can be miniaturized without loss of performance and will have very few moving parts, hence lower maintenance needs. These traits are preferred in systems desired to be used for cooling electronics in thermally harsh environments (such as oil well, military machinery, and vicinity of automobile engines) that are characterized by temperatures greater than 200°C and provide little or no room for maintenance activities during operation. However, ambient temperatures near 200°C place constraints on the temperature difference between hot and cold sides of a TE device across which it could pump heat with appreciable COP (>0.4). This leaves little room to change the operating parameters of a TE device and hence that of the adsorption heat pump; as a result, only a small range of cooling load may be thermally managed. In practice, such a system will be less desirable since heat dissipation from electronics can keep changing during operation. In this work, the options available to manage varying cooling load while satisfying the thermal constraints on a TE device have been investigated using a theoretical model. Varying the number of active TE devices in response to a changing cooling load has been suggested as the most promising solution.