Optimization of Fin Distribution to Improve the Temperature Uniformity of a Heat Exchanger in a Thermoelectric Generator

Abstract

Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) are currently a topic of interest for energy recovery in vehicles. By applying TEGs to the outside surface of the exhaust tailpipe, a small amount of electrical power can be generated because of the temperature difference between the hot exhaust gases and the automobile coolant. The amount of power is anticipated to be a few hundred watts based on the expected temperature difference and the properties of the thermoelectric materials used in TEGs. It is well know that, for thermoelectric exhaust energy recovery, the temperature uniformity of the heat exchangers has a strong influence on the electric power generation. In the current research, the temperature uniformity of a heat exchanger was improved by optimizing the fin distribution to maximize the electric power generated for a given vehicle TEG. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the heat exchanger was constructed to assess the influence of different fin distributions on the temperature uniformity and the pressure drop in the exhaust system. For the fin distributions, four factors were considered: the length of, spacing between, angle of, and thickness of the fins. Based on these four factors, a design of experiments study using the orthogonal experimental method was conducted to analyze the sensitivity to the design variables and build a database to set up a surrogate model using the Kriging response surface method. A multi-island genetic algorithm was used to optimize the fin distribution based on this surrogate model. To validate the accuracy of the CFD model, a generic heat exchanger module was manufactured and a related testbed constructed, then the temperature distribution on the surface of the exchanger was measured to compare with the results obtained by CFD.