The simulated cooling performance of a thin-film thermoelectric cooler with coupled-thermoelements connected in parallel.

The thermoelements of the traditional thin-film thermoelectric cooler (TEC) are connected electrically in series, thus the performance of traditional thin-film TEC reduces sharply when there is something wrong with any thermoelement. On account of this deficiency, we proposed a novel thin-film TEC with a couple of thermoelements electrically connected in parallel and then electrically connected in series to the next couple of thermoelements. The performance and reliability of the novel thin-film TEC is compared with the traditional thin-film TEC.