Multiscale Modeling of Thermoelectric Cooler

By Allison Anne Campbell1; Mohammad Zunaidur Rashid; afsana sharmin1; Shaikh S. Ahmed1

1. Southern Illinois University Carbondale

This tool simulates a practical thermoelectric cooler unit with atomistic models

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Version 1.1 - published on 18 Nov 2015

doi:10.4231/D36H4CR60 cite this

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Abstract

Here, our objective is to deploy a multiscale simulator for thermoelectric cooler devices, where the material parameters are obtained atomistically using a combination of molecular dynamics and tight-binding simulations and then used in the system level design. In a recently published work [A. Sharmin, M. Rashid, V. Gaddipati, A. Sadeque, and S. Ahmed, “Multiscale Design of Nanostructured Thermoelectric Coolers: Effects of Contact Resistances,” Journal of Electronic Materials, in press, DOI: 10.1007/s11664-014-3520-8, November 2014], after benchmarking the simulator against a recent experimental work [I. Chowdhury, R. Prasher, K. Lofgreen, G. Chrysler, S. Narasimhan, R. Mahajan, D. Koester, R. Alley and R. Venkatasubramanian, “On-chip cooling by superlattice-based thin-film thermoelectrics”, Nature Nanotechnology, vol. 4, pp. 235–238, 2009], we carried out a detailed numerical investigation of the performance of Bi2Te3 nanowire based thermoelectric devices for hot-spot cooling. The results suggest that active hotspot cooling of as much as 23 ºC with a high heat flux is achievable using such low-dimensionality structures. However, it has been observed that thermal and electrical contact resistances, which are quite large in nanostructures, play a critical role in determining the cooling range and lead to significant performance degradation that must be addressed before these devices can be deployed in such applications.

Credits

Allison Campbell, Afsana Sharmin, Mohammad Rashid, Chance Baker, Vamsi Gaddipati, Krishna Yalavarthi, and Shaikh Ahmed

Sponsored by

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation Grant No. CCF-1218839.

Shaikh S. Ahmed would like to acknowledge the computational support from NSF 0855221 CRI II: Southern Illinois High-Performance Computing Infrastructure (SIHPCI).

References

Afsana Sharmin, Mohammad Rashid, Vamsi Gaddipati, Abu Sadeque, and Shaikh Ahmed, “Multiscale Design of Nanostructured Thermoelectric Coolers: Effects of Contact Resistances,” Journal of Electronic Materials, vol. 44, no. 6, pp. 1697–1703, 2015.

G. Jeffrey Snyder, Marco Soto, Randy Alley, David Koester, Bob Conner, “Hot Spot Cooling using Embedded Thermoelectric Coolers,” 22nd IEEE SEMI-THERM Symposium, pp. 135–143, 2006.

I. Chowdhury, R. Prasher, K. Lofgreen, G. Chrysler, S. Narasimhan, R. Mahajan, D. Koester, R. Alley and R. Venkatasubramanian, “On-chip cooling by superlattice-based thin-film thermoelectrics”, Nature Nanotechnology, vol. 4, pp. 235–238, 2009.

Publications

Afsana Sharmin, Mohammad Rashid, Vamsi Gaddipati, Abu Sadeque, and Shaikh Ahmed, “Multiscale Design of Nanostructured Thermoelectric Coolers: Effects of Contact Resistances,” Journal of Electronic Materials, vol. 44, no. 6, pp. 1697–1703, 2015.

Cite this work

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

  • Afsana Sharmin, Mohammad Rashid, Vamsi Gaddipati, Abu Sadeque, and Shaikh Ahmed, “Multiscale Design of Nanostructured Thermoelectric Coolers: Effects of Contact Resistances,” Journal of Electronic Materials, vol. 44, no. 6, pp. 1697–1703, 2015.

     

     

     

  • Allison Anne Campbell, Mohammad Zunaidur Rashid, afsana sharmin, Shaikh S. Ahmed (2015), "Multiscale Modeling of Thermoelectric Cooler," https://nanohub.org/resources/multiscaletec. (DOI: 10.4231/D36H4CR60).

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Tags

  1. nanoelectronics
  2. thermoelectricity/thermoelectrics