Distributed control of thermoelectric coolers

Walker, D.G., Frampton, K.D. and Harvey, R.D. (2004) Distributed control of thermoelectric coolers. In Proceedings of ITHERM '04. The Ninth Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems, 2004. IEEE. pp. 361-366 .

Abstract

Thermoelectric refrigeration has been studied for use in electronics cooling applications. Because of their low efficiency, a significant amount of additional heat is produced that must be removed from the device by passive means. However, even well-designed passive heat removal systems are faced with physical limitations and can not dissipate additional energy. Therefore, thermoelectric coolers often are not a viable alternative to chip cooling. Distributed control refers to a concept where individual devices operate based on their local condition and that of their nearest neighbors. With this approach a large number of sensors and actuators can be bundled with minimal compute power and communication. In the case of electronics cooling, a thermoelectric cooler can be constructed as many separate coolers, each with its own thermocouple and minimal control system. With this architecture, only those regions that generate heat will be cooled thermoelectrically reducing the impact on the heat removal system and increasing the viability of thermoelectric coolers. Through analytic TEC heat models, the present work seeks to evaluate the possibility of using distributed controlled thermoelectric coolers for microelectronics cooling applications. Results indicate that TEC coolers can provide a two-fold increase in efficiency when distributed control is used for nonuniformly heated chips.

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