Performance investigation of new design thermoelectric air conditioning system for electric vehicles

Conventional automobile air conditioning systems use environmentally harmful Chlorofluorocarbons. This method also makes noise and uses a lot of battery energy, making it unsuitable for electric vehicles. So in this paper, the performance of a newly designed cooling system based on the thermo-electric cooling technique installed on the vehicle's roof is proposed and investigated. A complete theoretical transient thermal model based on energy balances is constructed, solved, and validated. The results show an optimum value of the used number of thermoelectric modules, which depends on the input power. This value is 150 for an input power of 200 W and 100 for an input power of 1000 W. At an ambient temperature of 42 °C and without applying a cooling system, moving vehicle with three persons and closed windows, its cabin temperature reaches about 66 °C; in contrast, after applying the TEC system, this temperature reaches around 26 °C at input power 1000 W. The coefficient of performance of the system reduces from about 3 to about 0.85 by increasing the input power from 200 to 1000 W, respectively. Although the coefficient of performance of this system is lower than that of the conventional, it has advantages that make it competitive with conventional air conditioning systems. An economic study based on the Egyptian market shows that the annual cost of the thermo-electric cooling system is lower than that of the conventional one.