CHITKARA INSTITUTE OF ENGG.

& TECHNOLOGY

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ON

Study of Reservoir Cooling by Means of Peltier Effect

SUBMITTED TO: ms. Riya Khurana Asst. prof

SUBMITTED BY: Name Sanjeev kumar rai roll no. e093047 Univ roll. 90180517489

Study of Reservoir Cooling by Means of Peltier Effect

Abstract
The present work studies numerically and experimentally the water cooling process by means of natural convection inside a closed reservoir. The cooling process is performed by Peltier or Thermoelectric effect. The purpose here is to obtain the thermal gradient inside the reservoir and to search for the best point where the coldest water can be extracted from the reservoir, which can be considered a geometric optimization of the device thermal design. The analyzed flow is incompressible, laminar, transient and three-dimensional. The Boussinesq approximation is employed for the treatment of buoyancy forces. For the numerical approach of the flow, the mass, momentum and energy conservation equations are solved by a commercial package based on the finite volume method. The temperature field as function of time obtained by numerical simulations is confronted with the experimental data. The numerical results estimated satisfactorily the transient thermal behavior predicted by laboratory experiments. introduction: The topic of numerical study of reservoir cooling by mean of peltier effect has received increasing attention in recent years. Calculations of maximum temperature difference and coefficient of performance of double segment Peltier thermocouple are presented. Distinction of thermoelectric properties of p- and n-type segments is taken into account. Obtained results are compared with measured characteristics of manufactured Peltier thermocouples. It is shown that efficiency of thermocouples using distributed Peltier effect can be improved if optimized thermoelectric properties of segments depending on temperature are used. For dimensioning and optimum control of Peltier coolers and heat pumps, an accurate numerical description of the performance parameters under various operation conditions is required. Here, the situation for homogeneous bismuth antimony telluride based Peltier cooler material is discussed, using representative values of constant material parameters in comparison to real experimental data of the temperature dependence of the thermoelectric properties. For the case of a constant pellet cross section, given pellet length and neglecting heat transfer aside, the problem

can be treated as one-dimensional. The relation between electric current density j, temperature difference T, and absorbed cooling power or COP, respectively, along a single Peltier element have been considered by ab-initio calculations and plotted for the entire two-dimensional range (over j and T) of relevant operating conditions, assuming constant material properties. Accordingly, the spatial temperature distribution inside the thermoelectric material has been calculated. Differential equations governing thermoelectric transports have been analytically and numerically solved by the software tool MATHEMATICA. This instrument is capable of solving the inhomogeneous second order differential equation for the temperature profile even for non constant coefficients with mixed boundary conditions provided. Thus, exact temperature profiles along the pellet can be easily calculated taking into account the correct temperature dependence of the material properties. The maximum temperature difference has been determined for arbitrarily given cooling power or COP, respectively, including zero temperature difference and adiabatic cold side (T max) cases. Evidence is provided for a very good quantitative agreement between Tmax values calculated using real temperature dependent material properties or volume averaged constant values