Building Integrated Thermoelectric Air Conditioners—A Potentially Fully Environmentally Friendly Solution in Building Services
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5334/fce.76Keywords:
Thermoelectric, air conditioner, COP, waste heat utilization, building integrationAbstract
The refrigerants used in conventional vapor-compression air conditioning systems have detrimental effects on the global environment. Phasing-down hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants for HVAC equipment over the next 20 years has been proposed. A thermoelectric air conditioning system that directly converts electrical energy to thermal energy using a simple solid-state semiconductor device, has the advantages of environmentally friendly, no refrigerant, very compact, high reliability, no moving parts (except for small fans), and it can be easily integrated into the building structure. However, the existing thermoelectric air conditioning systems have the problem of low Coefficient of Performance (COP), which limits its applications for domestic air conditioning. With the development of the thermoelectric technologies, the above problem is prospected to be solved. The paper presents an overview of recent advances in thermoelectric materials, thermoelectric module design and thermoelectric heating and cooling system design which would provide the potential to greatly improve the COP of the thermoelectric air conditioner. In addition, utilizing the waste heat of the thermoelectric system for domestic applications to improve the overall COP of the system would be an ideal way to promote public adoption of the TE air conditioner, which is discussed in this paper. The paper also presents an overview of the existing building integrated thermoelectric air conditioning systems and proposes a novel building integrated thermoelectric system that integrates a thermoelectric heat pump unit into a double-skin ventilated facade to provide heating and cooling, heat recovery ventilation and domestic hot water or drying services for buildings, based on the thermoelectric waste heat utilization. Several building integration methods of the proposed system are presented.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 The Author(s)
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms (if a submission is rejected or withdrawn prior to publication, all rights return to the author(s)):- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
Submitting to the journal implicitly confirms that all named authors and rights holders have agreed to the above terms of publication. It is the submitting author's responsibility to ensure all authors and relevant institutional bodies have given their agreement at the point of submission.
Note: some institutions require authors to seek written approval in relation to the terms of publication. Should this be required, authors can request a separate licence agreement document from the editorial team (e.g. authors who are Crown employees).