Solid-State Cooling in Automotives for Climate Control

In modern vehicles, a significant amount of power is consumed to cool the cabin and maintain the passengers' thermal comfort, which results in energy drain from the battery, reducing the overall energy efficiency of the vehicle. Due to its numerous benefits, a solid-state Thermoelectric cooling (TEC) method has been proposed as an alternative cabin cooling system to address this issue. TEC uses the Peltier effect to create a temperature difference between two junctions of a TE device, developing a classical cold plate condition. This cold plate absorbs heat from the cabin air, which is then dissipated to the outside while cooling the interiors. This cooling method does not require refrigerant, has no moving parts, and is compact and lightweight. The present study proposes an alternative automotive air conditioning system and investigates its performance characteristics for providing better thermal comfort conditions while effectively reducing the cooling power. Numerical simulations were performed using CFD and MATLAB to study the thermal comfort of the human body inside the automotive cabin. The results show that applying small and flexible TE cooling devices provides more possibilities for an efficient automotive air conditioning system. The study also investigates the velocity and temperature profiles of the localized TE cooling built for better human comfort by providing uniform air flow in the cabin. An estimated improvement of almost 9% was obtained when this arrangement was compared with the conventional refrigeration system regarding human comfort. The key findings of this study show that the TE cooling system exhibits superior refrigeration performance with low energy consumption, which not only ensures the thermal comfort of the driver but also reduces the energy consumption of the air conditioner.