So it's a better Peltier element? The article only seems to compare it to existing thermoelectric devices and not standard refrigeration units so I'm going to assume they haven't gotten even close to that efficiency. If they had I would assume they wouldn't shut up about the fact.

Also one of the biggest if not the biggest downside of these chips is, unlike a split refrigeration circuit, the front gets cold while the back gets hot which means you can't move the heat very far.

> the APL team achieved nearly 100% improvement in efficiency over traditional thermoelectric materials at room temperature

Peltier effect refrigeration has very low efficiencies (5%) so while this is an amazing accomplishment it will not replace other more mechanical cooling methods.

Thermoelectric cooling needs as much research as possible. Mechanical cooling is extraordinarily space consuming. CHESS has the potential over the next 10 years to largely replace vapor compression in most systems other than the most extreme gradients or scales. They are small enough to incorporate into most devices and would allow smaller devices more thermal load. In some ways I think efficient TEC like CHESS could be more useful than room temperature super conductors.

Most IR cameras use Peltier cooling so better coolers should lead to better cameras.

The paper[1] has some actual details, like this:

Under low-heat-pumping, with minimal role of parasitics, TFTEC modules offer four times the Coefficient of Performance (CoP) advantage over bulk devices. As an example, system-level CoP with a 16-couple TFTEC module is ~ 15 for small temperature differentials of 2 °C, pumping about 1.2 W heat load using 80 mW of electric power. Such small-scale high-CoP cooling is relevant for distributed refrigeration or compartmentalized refrigeration as well as for use in future electronic thermal management

They also note that the maximum cooling power density depends inversely on thickness, and this is where the thin-film TECs like this gets most of their improvements from, compared to millimeter thick regular TECs.

Just a quick scan before going to bed, but looks interesting for certain applications.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59698-y

From the abstract:

>system-level coefficient-of-performance is ~15 for temperature differentials of 1.3 °C.

There's a long way to go. As far as I know, the leader in condensed-phase refrigeration cycles is still the sodium iodide ionocaloric method, which blew past all of the competing methods (magnetocaloric, elastocaloric, thermoelectric) when it was announced in 2022:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade1696

...but the temperature drop of 25 C is just barely practical for air conditioning in warm (but not desert) climates.

So, these devices.... turn heat into electricity? Where does the electricity go, back into the system it's powering?

Obligatory video on the inefficiencies of thermoelectric cooling/Peltier elements from Techonology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnMRePtHMZY

I need this for my compact compost freezer [1]

[1] https://www.envirofreezely.com/

Thermoelectric cooling is pretty inefficient, because the materials need to balance competing requirements:

- Good thermal insulator - Good electrical conductor - Good semiconductor

This is because the hot & cold sides are sandwiched closely together as a PN junction, so once you move heat from one side to the other, it just leaks right back. Mechanical cooling doesn't have this problem, because the hot & cold sides are separated by thin bits of tubing. This makes the thermal leakage a "minor annoyance" in a mechanical system as opposed to "literally the whole problem we're trying to solve" as it is with thermoelectrics.

One work-around is to stack lots & lots of thermoelectric coolers on top of each other. That reduces the temperature difference at each individual PN junction, which in turn lowers the leakage. That's what this team is doing, but using layers that are only a few nanometers thick, so they can fit dozens or hundreds of junctions in a single package.