Experimental performance investigation of minichannel water cooled-thermoelectric refrigerator

Abstract

An experimental performance analysis of minichannel water cooled-thermoelectric refrigerator in this study is presented. The cooling system of refrigerator is consists of two thermoelectric modules integrated with the minichannel heat sinks in its hot side and the heat dissipaters in its cold side. The experiments carried out for different system voltages and different flow rates of cooling water in the minichannel. The results show that the inner temperature of water cooled-thermoelectric refrigerator is about 2 °C for 0.8 L/min flow rate while it is about −0.1 °C for 1.5 L/min flow rate at the end of 2-h experiment. COP value of thermoelectric refrigerator is 0.23 in the flow rate 1.5 L/min while COP is 0.19 in the flow rate 0.8 L/min at the end of 25 min cooling times. When it comes to 8 V system voltages, COP of the thermoelectric refrigerator is about 0.41 at the end of 25 min operating period for the flow rate 1.5 L/min. This study concludes that the performance of minichannel heat sink used in this study has as good as other liquid water cooled systems used to absorb heat from thermoelectric modules hot side.

Keywords

• Thermoelectric
• Refrigeration
• Minichannel heat sink
• Coefficient-of-performance