论文信息 - An investigation of thermoelectric cooling devices for small‐scale space conditioning applications in buildings

An investigation of thermoelectric cooling devices for small‐scale space conditioning applications in buildings

This paper presents the study of a thermoelectric cooler (TEC) designed for small-scale space conditioning applications in buildings. A theoretical study was undertaken to find the optimum operating conditions, which were then applied in the laboratory testing work. A TEC unit was assembled and tested under laboratory conditions. Eight pieces of UltraTEC were shown to generate up to 220 W of cooling with a COP of 0.46 under the input current of 4.8 A for each module. Thermo-economical analysis was carried out and results showed that a system with PV panel can compete with an equivalent system without a PV panel when PV costs fall down to or lower than £1.25 per Watt. For the cases without a PV panel, the system with a high level of TEC power input delivered a better performance in terms of the average cooling energy price than that system with a low level of TEC power input after critical interest rate (currently 4%). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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