Electrical Energy Harvesting from Thermal Energy with Converged Infrared Light

Abstract

Photovoltaics (PV) cell is a common energy harvester that had been used to harvest solar energy and convert it into electrical energy. However, the vast energy from the spectrum of sunlight is not fully harvested. Therefore, thermoelectric (TE) module that harvest electrical energy from heat is being proposed in this paper. Generally, the part of the sunlight spectrum that induce heat is in the spectrum band of infrared (IR). For the experimental set-up in this paper, infrared (IR) light bulb was being used to simulate the IR spectrum band of the sunlight. In order to maximize the heat energy collection, a convex lens was being used to converge the IR light and therefore focused the heat on an aluminium sheet and heat sink which was placed on top of the hot side of the TE module. The distance between convex lens and IR light bulb is varying in between 10cm and 55cm and the reading was taken at an interval of 5cm. Firstly, the temperature of the IR light and converged IR light were recorded and plotted in graph. The graph showed that the temperature of the converged IR light bulb is higher than the IR light bulb. Lastly, the voltage and power output of the TE module with different heat source was compared. The output voltage and power of the TE module increased inverse proportional to the distance between IR light bulb and TE module.