Geometric optimization of thermo-electric coolers using simulated annealing

The field of thermo-electric coolers (TECs) has grown drastically in recent years. In an extreme environment as thermal energy and gas drilling operations, TEC is an effective cooling mechanism for instrument. However, limitations such as the relatively low energy conversion efficiency and ability to dissipate only a limited amount of heat flux may seriously damage the lifetime and performance of the instrument. Until now, many researches were conducted to expand the efficiency of TECs. The material parameters are the most significant, but they are restricted by currently available materials and module fabricating technologies. Therefore, the main objective of finding the optimal TECs design is to define a set of design parameters. In this paper, a new method of optimizing the dimension of TECs using simulated annealing (SA), to maximize the rate of refrigeration (ROR) was proposed. Equality constraint and inequality constraint were taken into consideration. This work reveals that SA shows better performance than Cheng's work.