Abstract
Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) have shown great potentials to supply low-power sensor nodes in aerospace applications due to their relatively small size, adequate output power and reliability. TEGs convert waste heat available at aircraft locations into a usable potential difference. However, TEGs’ performance greatly depends on the use of passive cooling systems such as heatsinks to enhance their energy supply. This paper reports the first proof-of-concept use of vapour chambers coupled to traditional circular pin-fin heatsinks to enhance the output power of TEGs. Vapour chambers are compact and small capillary-driven heat spreaders that incorporate a cavity in their volume containing a working fluid to provide a high effective thermal conductivity. Numerical simulations and experimental tests revealed that the use of vapour chambers provided significant increase of the output power, with a maximum produced power of 28.2 W and a relative difference of 6.27 W against conventional energy scavenging configurations. Results demonstrate the high thermal cooling performance of vapour chambers to efficiently support thermal energy harvesting solutions designed for condition and structural health monitoring.
Highlights
Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems have been developed in the past decade to enable accurate damage inspection of both aluminium and composite aircraft components (Ostachowicz and Guemes, 2013)
This paper focussed on enhancing Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) power output by numerically and experimentally analysing the thermal cooling performance of vapour chambers (VCs) used in combination with traditional heatsinks made of circular pin-fin arrays
VCs coupled to heatsinks have shown to be effective heat spreading systems to enhance the cooling performance of conventional TEGs used for lowpower SHM thermoelectric technology
Summary
Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems have been developed in the past decade to enable accurate damage inspection of both aluminium and composite aircraft components (Ostachowicz and Guemes, 2013). This paper focussed on enhancing TEGs power output by numerically and experimentally analysing the thermal cooling performance of vapour chambers (VCs) used in combination with traditional heatsinks made of circular pin-fin arrays. To heat pipes and flat plate heat pipes, VCs are capillary-driven heat spreaders that incorporate a small cavity in their body (chamber) containing a working fluid (Blet et al, 2017; Bulut et al, 2019) This fluid is used as a mean to extract energy from the heat source through evaporation and condensation, enhancing the cooling properties of the power scavenging system (Liu et al, 2017). To the best of authors’ knowledge, VC technology has never been proposed before to enhance the power output of thermal energy harvesting solutions consisting of TEG elements and heatsinks for aerospace applications.
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