What is the Peltier Effect?
Jean Charles Athanase Peltier probably didn’t know that he would be one of the first inventors of the refrigerator. Modern students are often introduced to Peltier as a physicist, but might be surprised to find that he didn’t study physics until his retirement from the clock-making business at age thirty. But regardless of his experience in the field, the contributions he made to physics were immense. The Peltier effect was an inadvertent discovery that Peltier made when he was investigating electricity. In an experiment that he would remember the rest of his life, Peltier joined copper wire and bismuth wire together and connected them to each other, then to a battery. When he switched the battery on, one of the junctions of the two wires got hot, while the other junction got cold. If the cold junction was put inside an insulated box, it became a low-efficiency refrigerator. The Peltier effect is sometimes coupled with its inverse, called the Seebeck effect, and the two effects can be
The Peltier effect is a temperature difference created by applying a voltage between two electrodes connected to a sample of semiconductor material. This phenomenon can be useful when it is necessary to transfer heat from one medium to another on a small scale. The Peltier effect is one of three types of thermoelectric effect; the other two are the Seebeck effect and the Thomson effect. In a Peltier-effect device, the electrodes are typically made of a metal with excellent electrical conductivity.
