Efficient Simulation of Thermoelectric Cooler Based on Equivalent Heat Flux Model and Multi-Port Thermal Conductance Network

This article presents an efficient approach for the simulation of thermoelectric coolers (TECs) employed in thermal management of electronic packaging. The solution domain is initially classified into three distinct regions: the thermoelectric device region (TDR), the heat sink region (HSR), and the integrated circuit and package region (ICPR). To address the low computational efficiency in TDR caused by the nonlinear characteristics of TEC legs, we propose a novel 1-D equivalent heat flux model (EHFM) to represent the original 3-D structures. Meanwhile, the HSR and ICPR are treated as the linear systems, and their thermal effects on the TDR are transformed into a multi-port thermal conductance network (MTCN) at the interface. By this means, different regions are coupled only at the ports through the temperature and heat flow continuity conditions. Moreover, we propose a boundary compression method and proper orthogonal decomposition to enhance the construction efficiency of the MTCN. Finally, the temperature distribution within the ICPR is reconstructed based on the port heat flux, which is derived from the coupled EHFM and MTCN. The validity and efficiency of the proposed method are illustrated through numerical examples, achieving a 139× speedup compared with commercial software.