Thermoelectric Generator Research Paper

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Experimental study on heat sink for thermoelectric generator 1 Introduction Thermoelectric devices are considered playing an important role in the green energy technology. In our daily life, enormous amount of waste heats is produced and they are not recycled. Thermoelectric generator can recover the waste heat to produce energy [1, 2]. In the United State, it is estimated that there are 20% to 50% of industrial energy input is lost as heat [3], this shows that many of the power have been wasted. Thus, recover of waste heat via different system, such as using thermoelectric generator, can bring great benefits and indirectly increase the efficiency of our system. In recent year, there are many attempts to recover waste heat using thermoelectric …show more content…

The efficiency of a Peltier modules is only in between one-third and half of the conventional household devices [10]. Thus the application is heavily restricted to area that cost is not important, system reliability and quietness during operation is the dominating factor. For thermoelectric generator, the conversion efficiency is below 20% [11]. As there are more efficient products on the market, the high operating temperature (some require operating at above 700°C), the high material cost (some may cost more than 6000 UDS/kg) and the low output efficiency depending on the material chosen compel the growth of thermoelectric generator market [12]. Consider that waste heat is a costless power source [2], the low efficiency of the thermoelectric generator [6] is no longer a significant …show more content…

The temperature difference on two sides of the modules will directly affect the voltage generated. In which the performance of the thermoelectric generator can be given by where is the Seebeck coefficient, is the electrical conductivity, is the thermal conductivity and T is the temperature in absolute scale [15]. As thermoelectric generators are relatively having low efficiency, it is restricted to very specialized application such as medical, military and space applications [16]. Compare to other proposing technology such as Organic Rankine Cycle, which also convert heat into electricity, the efficiency of thermoelectric generator is only about half to the Organic Rankine Cycle under condition that we are converting low to medium temperature (below 493.15 K or 220°C is consider to be medium temperature) heat to electricity [17]. In which by far is the most common heating temperature that we will come across in our daily life

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