Investigating an active cooling system powered by a thermoelectric generator

The diffusion of powerful microprocessors, even in embedded processing, justifies the need for more efficient heat dissipation. Even though the implementation of active cooling is often easy, in this study, we show how to lower the temperature of a general-purpose microprocessor with energy harvesting techniques. We present a joint thermal and electrical analysis of a thermoelectric-powered active cooler and we demonstrate that it is possible to decrease the temperature some Celsius degrees with respect to a regular passive cooler using the same energy dissipated by the processor under the heat-sink.