Electricity Generation from a Solar Parabolic Concentrator Coupled to a Thermoelectric Module

Abstract

The concept of generating electricity from the sun's energy using a parabolic concentrator and a thermoelectric (TE) module is presented in this study. The proposed TE solar concentrator was composed of a parabolic dish collector with an aperture of 1.5 m that was used to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver plate with an area of 10 × 10 cm2. One BiTe-based TE module installed on the receiver plate was used to convert the concentrated solar thermal energy directly into electric energy. A rectangular fin heat sink coupled with a fan was used to release heat from the cold side of TE module and a tracking system was used to continuously track the sun. The effects of fan orientation and air flow rate were investigated. Under maximum heat flux, the TE module was able to produce 1.32W at 0.42 m3/min of the air flow rate (pushing air), corresponding to 2.89% conversion efficiency. The proposed concept seems to be reliable and merits further investigation.