An internal penalty discontinuous Galerkin method for simulating a thermoelectric cooler

Compact modelling of a thermoelectric cooler in the computational fluid dynamics approach is essential for reliable product design in the telecommunication industry, particularly for the package design of the optical laser or the wavelength selective switch. When simulating these fluid thermal structure interaction problems numerically, stability and high order of accuracy are required to capture all of the necessary physics. The principle benefit of using the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method is that it can produce a high order accurate scheme which can achieve an equivalent error compared to the lower order scheme with orders of magnitude lower computational effort. Based on the recent development of a framework for the computation of fluid thermal structure interaction problems within multi-solid domains using DG methods on unstructured grids([1,2]) ; this paper has proposed a detailed compact thermoelectric cooler (TEC) modelling method based on an existing black box like compact TEC model [4]. Close comparisons validate that both the detailed and the black box like compact model are accurate enough to simulate the conduction only case. When air convection is required to carry out a system-level thermal management optimization, the detailed compact modelling method is more reliable than the black box like compact TEC model. Furthermore, the thermal expansion of an operating TEC has been examined. Compared to the black box like compact TEC model, the simulation results of the detailed compact method have better agreement with electronic speckle pattern interferometry data.