Numerical study of reservoir cooling by means of Peltier effect

Abstract

The present work studies numerically and experimentally the water cooling process by means of natural convection inside a closed reservoir. The cooling process is performed by Peltier or Thermoelectric effect. The purpose here is to obtain the thermal gradient inside the reservoir and to search for the best point where the coldest water can be extracted from the reservoir, which can be considered a geometric optimization of the device thermal design. The analyzed flow is incompressible, laminar, transient and three-dimensional. The Boussinesq approximation is employed for the treatment of buoyancy forces. For the numerical approach of the flow, the mass, momentum and energy conservation equations are solved by a commercial package based on the finite volume method (FLUENT®). The temperature field as function of time obtained by numerical simulations is confronted with the experimental data. The numerical results estimated satisfactorily the transient thermal behavior predicted by laboratory experiments.