Efficient Simulation and Design of Thermoelectric Cooler for Thermal Management Using Equivalent Thermal Resistance Model

In this article, an efficient method is proposed to simulate and design thermoelectric coolers (TECs) for the thermal management of electronic systems. First, the entire electronic system is divided into two regions: the thermoelectric device region (TDR) and the nonthermoelectric region (NTR). Since the TDR contains a large number of thermoelectric devices with nonlinear characteristics, it poses a serious challenge to efficient simulation and optimization. Therefore, we propose a novel 1-D equivalent thermal resistance model (ETRM) to represent the thermoelectric device. On the other hand, the NTR mainly includes the ceramic substrate, thermal interface material (TIM), active chips, and passive heat sink, which can be treated as a linear system. Therefore, a macromodeling technique is employed to convert the influence of the NTR on the TDR into a multi-port thermal resistance network (MTRN) at the interface. By this means, the TDR and NTR are only coupled at the ports with the temperature continuity and heat flow continuity conditions, and the heat flux at all the ports can be quickly solved. Finally, the temperature distribution around the chips is reconstructed by the port heat flux. Since both TDR and NTR are represented by the equivalent models (ETRM and MTRN, respectively), the computational cost is significantly reduced. The accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated by several numerical examples, and a speed-up of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$29\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> in computational efficiency is achieved compared with the commercial software.