Rules of Thumb for TECs
- Always use thermal grease to interface with the TEC. The watt density of the TEC is relatively large in comparison with the heat exchangers, so you want to minimize the temperature drop across this important interface.
- Even though the TEC acts as a heat pump, you must use a heat exchanger on the hot side to pull the heat to the ambient sink. The watt density of a TEC is normally higher than what can be achieved with natural convection on the surface of the TEC.
- For a given power input into a TEC, you can either achieve a large temperature drop across the device with little heat pumping, or a large amount of heat pumping with little temperature drop. There is a trade-off between these two performance extremes.
Some equations you will need:
