Realizing a 10 °C Cooling Effect in a Flexible Thermoelectric Cooler Using a Vortex Generator.

Xu, Shengduo; Li, Meng; Dai, Yuchen; Hong, Min; Sun, Qiang; Lyu, Wanyu; Liu, Ting; Wang, Yuan et al. · Adv Mater · 2022

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

In this study, flexible thermoelectric coolers (FTECs) are used to develop an alternative personalized cooling technology to achieve a large temperature drop of 10 °C and cooling capacity of 256 W m<sup>-2</sup> . Such an excellent cooling performance is attributed to the innovative design of the quadra-layered Ag<sub>2</sub> Se/poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate structure in FTECs and the induced air vortices by the vortex generator attached to the hot surface of the device. The applied pulse-width modulation technique guarantees human body comfort at inconsistent ambient temperature by modulating the duty ratio of the power source, which also saves 35% of the power consumption. As a result, the as-prepared FTECs only consume 68.5 W so as to maintain a comfortable skin temperature (32 ± 0.5 °C) when the ambient temperature is at 31 °C. This technology provides a reliable and adjustable solution for personalized cooling in environments where comfortable temperatures are exceeded.