Thermoelectric modules thermal conductance measurement system

This paper presents an experimental method for determining the thermal conductance variation with temperature of a thermoelectric module (TEM). In general when building a Spice model for the TEM, the temperature variation of the internal parameters is not taken into account. This leads to errors when high accuracy is desired in designing and simulating TEM based applications. The authors propose a modular test stand that is primary used for an energy harvesting application and can be modified to also measure the TEMs thermal conductance variations with temperature. A virtual instrumentation application is used to automate the process. The experimental results are presented and compared with the datasheet values. The obtained results will be used to build an improved thermoelectrical Spice model that takes into account the parameters variation with temperature.