Performance comparison between rectangular and trapezoidal-shaped thermoelectric legs manufactured by a dispenser printing technique

Abstract

At present, device engineering has been limited to the rectangular-shaped TE leg. Therefore, a trapezoidal-shaped leg has been proposed for the TE system and prototypes are developed in this work. Performance comparison has been investigated between rectangular and proposed trapezoidal-shaped leg based TE prototypes. The n-type (0.98Bi,0.02Sb)2(0.9Te,0.1Se)3 and p-type (0.25Bi,0.75Sb)2(0.95Te,0.05Se)3 are considered as base material with Durabond-950 binder material to manufacture TE legs by using a cost-effective dispenser printing technology. The current study includes analysis of SEM imaging, characterization of manufactured TE legs, various experimental tests on TE prototypes, comparison between analytical and experimental results, and cost analyses. For the given restricted volume envelope, the trapezoidal-shaped TE prototype generates 1.24 times more voltage and 1.5 times more power when compared to the rectangular-shaped prototype at 30 °C hot side temperature when the cold side is exposed to the surrounding. For a given constant temperature boundary conditions (i.e., ΔT = 10 °C), the rectangular-shaped TE prototype harvests 1.4 times more power than the trapezoidal-shaped one, while the power density for rectangular TE prototype (i.e., 0.37 W/m3) is almost the same as trapezoidal one (i.e., 0.36 W/m3). Furthermore, the proposed trapezoidal-shaped prototype uses 28.6% less material by mass than the rectangular prototype.