Numerical Investigation of Thermo Electric Cooler (TEC) Based Thermal Control Scheme for Detector Thermal Management

Abstract

Now a days Electronic devices, controllers and circuits become more compact on the other side it becomes more power hungry. This will leads to greater energy densities due to the biggest challenge for a thermal engineer to provide thermal control and operate within its safe limits. Hence for that one such innovative solution is provided in the present study to maintain detector temperature by ThermoElectric Cooler. Thermoelectric cooler work on a Peltier cooler principle in which one side of the Peltier cooler becomes hot and another side becomes cold. Thermoelectric cooler is provide stable and instantaneous control for heating element and stabilized its temperature in the required operating limit The study aims to maintain the temperature of the space detector at 20±2℃ by using an appropriate thermoelectric cooler. Further modeling of the Peltier cooler and its setup was done in Siemens NX. Numerical investigation of the Peltier cooler based detector - coldfinger assembly is carried out with different cases like variation in detector temperature with different geometric configuration, variation in detector temperature with variation in radiator size and thickness and variation in cold side set point. From that, it is observed that the 3mm thickness with the size of 100X100mm radiator and 3.5℃ cold side set point is found optimum for 5W heat and 10% of the duty cycle to stabilize detector temperature in the range of 20±2℃. From the simulation, it is observed that the thermal mass is a must to maintain the TEC hot side temperature. Further increment in radiator area and thermal mass is limited up to a certain value. So it is better to go with the heat storage module like PCM to get an effect of thermal mass rather than increasing the thickness of the radiator.