Please give a lot of attention and participation from the members of the Mechanical Engineering department.

▣ Title: Thermoelectric Design

▣ Speaker: 이호성 교수

▣ Affiliation:  Western Michigan University 

▣ Date: 2024. 5. 3.(Fri) 13:00

▣ Venue: 제2공학관 B040호

▣ Abstract

 Thermoelectrics directly converts thermal energy into electrical energy or vice versa, which has the advantages of a lack of moving parts, small size, and flexible form factor. This presentation includes the essential understandings of thermoelectric devices like thermoelectric generators, coolers (refrigerators), and heat pumps. To understand the characteristics of the devices, the normalized curves using the maximum parameters were developed to visualize the general behaviors. A dimensionless number was used to calculate the performance. We compared two available devices from industrial manufacturers and research groups with the dimensionless number to elucidate the design, showing that there is obviously a considerable room for further improvements. Thermoelectrics is becoming more important as the higher efficient materials are developed over the world in future. This technique could be used in comprehensive and niche fields, such as automobile (EV), recuperating industrial waste heat, space agencies (radioisotope thermoelectric generators), electronic cooling (telecom lasers), medicine (micro robots), refrigerant-free heating and cooling (heat pumps), wireless sensor networks (radioactive areas), climate control in military (cooling/heating clothes, pilots, etc.).