A French watchmaker and physicist, Jean Charles A. Peltier, observed that electric currents produce heating or cooling at the interface between two dissimilar metals. This is now known as the Peltier effect and is used in numerous cooling applications, including air cooling of small refrigerators, beverage cooling in camping, cooling of electronic components, extraction of water in air by dehumidifiers, and cooling of CCDs in telescopes, spectrometers and cameras. In this lesson, a pair of PocketLab Voyagers with external temperature probes attached is used to investigate how a thermoelectric module cools on one side and heats up on the other side of the module.
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