Abstract
Lightweight, low cost and high thermal performance are some main features of porous media. In this research, porous-minichannel heat exchanger is proposed and comprehensively studied from thermal and economic viewpoints as an innovative and efficient heat rejection mechanism for thermoelectric generators applicable in low-grade waste heat recovery. Numerical simulations are carried out to study the effect of various porous substrate configurations including the vertical/horizontal sandwich, rectangular sandwich, vertical/horizontal sandwich block, and rectangular sandwich block distributions on thermal and economic characteristics of TEG. Besides, the influence of different geometric and operational parameters including Re number, the width of solid fins (Wr), the thickness of porous inserts (tp), and number of the channels (Nch) on the performance of the TEG system are investigated. Generally, the results show that the proposed porous minichannel enhances the thermal performance of thermoelectric generator compared to the conventional minichannel heat exchangers without porous fins. The increment of porous fin thickness improves the output voltage and power but has minimal impact on the conversion efficiency. Around 17.3% and 1.2% improvement of output power compared to the base smooth minichannel is shown for the models “M3” and “M5” respectively.
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