Thermoelectric Facades

Here, the inventors have conceived and demonstrated the thermoelectric facade, a novel facade system that integrates active and conventional thermoelectric (TE) modules for cooling, heating and energy generation. TE modules generate heat or cooling when electricity is applied, exploiting the Peltier effect, and produce a voltage when exposed to a temperature gradient, utilizing the Seebeck effect. Coupled with heat sinks, conductive materials and an electronic controller, the TE modules are employed in the facade system to heat or cool interior spaces of buildings, providing highly efficient and localized thermal management without requiring ducting, piping, or other large installations commonly associated with forced-air systems. In addition, thermoelectric facades can take advantage of temperature differences between interior and exterior to generate electricity at those times when active heating or cooling is not in use.

This novel, intelligent facade system can be integrated into various facade types, regardless of the building function. Its modularity allows for easy installation into façade assemblies of the existing buildings, increasing the overall energy performance of the building. Additionally, they can be used in the design and construction of new buildings with various types of building envelope, including curtain walls, rainscreen facades with aluminum cladding, opaque facades with window and vertical shading, and/or opaque facades with window and horizontal shading.

• Modular and easier to integrate into and maintain in new and existing building façades

• Applicable to a wide variety of building envelopes: curtain wall, rainscreen façade, opaque façade with vertical/horizontal shading

• Energy modeling shows substantial energy savings, between 9% and 37% depending on the climate, compared to traditional HVAC

• Improved thermal comfort of building occupants

• Personalized comfort: Occupants in each room of a building can set their preferred room temperature 

• Existing building retrofits, residential and commercial

• New buildings, residential and commercial

• High-performance buildings

Dr. Aksamija directed Perkins and Will Building Technology Laboratory (“Tech Lab”), one of the first practice-driven research laboratories focusing on advanced building technologies, high-performance buildings, computational design, and building facades. Her prior professional experience also includes U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ERDC Construction Engineering Research Laboratory and City of Champaign. She has taught architectural design studios, advanced environmental building design, comprehensive studios and seminars. She has worked on developing building analysis and modeling applications, implementation of novel materials in architectural design, development of computational models, and has collaborated with researchers from material science, civil and environmental engineering and computational design.

Dr. Zlatan Akšamija is an associate professor of engineering who studies heat transport and dissipation in nanostructures. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering (Summa Cum Laude, James Honors Scholar, Mathematics Minor) in 2003, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (with Computational Science and Engineering option) in 2005 and 2009, respectively, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. His dissertation work entitled “Thermal effects in semiconductor materials and devices” was supported by a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (2005-2009). Zlatan was awarded an Outstanding Paper award at the EIT’07 conference and a Greg Stillman Memorial semiconductor graduate research award in 2008. From 2009 to 2013, Zlatan was a Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellow and an NSF CI TraCS Fellow in the ECE department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focused on semiconductor nanostructures for thermoelectric energy conversion applications, as well as numerical methods for the coupled simulation of electronic and thermal transport. In 2013, Zlatan became an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and founded the NanoEnergy lab, where he studies nanoscale dissipation and heat transfer in 2-dimensional materials, alloys, and nanocomposites. He received the Best Paper award from IEEE Nano (2014) and a Lilly Teaching Fellowship from the UMass Institute for Teaching and Faculty Development. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2019.