In the first part of this study, we investigated the cooling performance of three different commercial thermoelectric cooler (TEC) devices as a part of a refrigeration system. Thermoelectric coolers type TEC1 – 12703, TEC1 – 12705 and TEC1 – 12706 were considered for this purpose. Exergy analysis provided the opportunity to investigate the variation in exergy efficiency and thermodynamic irreversibility of thermoelectric cooler devices at different TEC cold–side temperatures, starting from the total entropy generation rate of the TEC module. The optimum TEC1 – 12705 cooling module achieved maximum exergy efficiency values of 0.09 and irreversibility values between 21.2 W and 20.8 W at cold–side temperatures ranging from 3.8 °C to 6.5 °C. In the second part of this study, a 100 ml water glass was considered as a cooling load for the refrigeration system with the TEC1 – 12705 device. We evaluated the coefficient of performance of the overall refrigeration system, which includes the TEC module and ventilation fans as having values between 0.155 and 0.159 over 160 minutes of testing.
Viorel Ionescu (Thu,) studied this question.