An Investigation of the Application of Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Conjugate Heat Transfer of Thermoelectric Cooler

The thermoelectric cooling module has been widely used in the optical communication industry to maintain a stabilized temperature gradient in core optical components. The design of modern optoelectronic devices relies on the accurate numerical prediction of thermal loading on the hot-end components. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach applying the Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method to conjugate heat transfer (CHT) simulations. The incompressible Navier-Stokes (INS) equations under the Boussinesq assumption and solid heat equation are simultaneously discretised using an explicit DG formulation. A Dirichlet-Neumann partitioning strategy has been used to couple the heat fluxes between the solid and fluid domain, as well as heat transfer among multi solid domains. The stability of the methodology has been validated by several benchmark cases. The numerical results have shown good convergence in P and H refinement in both fluid dynamics and CHT problems.