Minimum power loss control — thermoelectric technology in power electronics cooling

This paper investigates the possibility of using thermoelectric cooling (TEC) modules to improve the power density of power electronics systems. A simple test setup served for comparison purposes is built. The result shows that, through the use of TEC modules to actively cool power electronics devices, the power handling capability is improved versus that of an identical passively cooled system. Then a minimum power loss control strategy for TEC is proposed. Experimental results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.