Modeling and thermal analysis of a solar thermoelectric generator with vortex tube for hybrid vehicle

Abstract

This paper presents a modeling and thermal analysis of a solar thermoelectric generator with vortex tube for hybrid vehicles. It is structured around three main objectives. The first is to present a model of STEG (Solar Thermoelectric Generator) equipped with a vortex tube and a turbocharger which, installed on a vehicle, produces electrical energy from the heat flows generated by the vortex tubes and solar radiation via the Seebeck effect to power the vehicle accessories and to compensate for some of the heat loss caused by the flow of air on the vehicle. The second objective is to determine the energy supply of the vortex tube by a thermodynamic approach and to carry out a thermal study of the whole device to determine the hot and cold side heat flows of the thermoelectric parts. Finally, the last objective is to determine the electrical current, power and output produced as a function of the parameters such as the speed of the vehicle, the fraction of cold air mass leaving the vortex tube and solar fluxes. As a result, we found that the electric power and the current decrease first at the start of the vehicle then converge quickly to different values depending on the setting of the cold air fraction of the vortex tube ranging from 0.05 to 0.9 and those for a solar flux of 178.59W/m2. So for a 3042 standard thermocouple pair STEG module, and a small size vortex tube used in recent work, we get a 55.5 m/s vehicle speed and a cold air fraction adjustment of 0.9, a power of 147.3 W and an electric current of 1.49 A. These values are very encouraging as they would increase considerably if thermoelectric materials recent and a high performance vortex tube are used.