Thermo-electric generator

Abstract

Thermal management and energy crisis have been two major problems in this 21st century. Engine exhaust has tremendous amount of energy which can be recovered by waste heat recovery systems. The thermoelectric concept is seen as a perfect solution for recovering waste heat from engine exhaust and converts in to electric energy. Since the use of semiconductor materials for thermoelectric applications, there has been a huge quest for improving its figure of merits (ZT) to make it commercially viable. This synopsis report presents the simulation and experimental validation study on the transient behavior of a proposed combined exhaust heat recovery device and thermoelectric power generation system. The proposed system consists of waste heat recovery that provides a heat flux source for thermoelectric generators. In this research, thermoelectric generator device are consist of two major part, first one is exhaust recovery device and second one is thermoelectric generation system. In the first phase of study, optimize the waste heat recovery system design, performed cfd analysis and get heat and temperature data then cfd model coupled with thermoelectric model, find out the thermoelectric effect on particular devices. This paper presents of numerical simulation for several the thermoelectric materials. Numerical simulation is carried out by using a finite element package ANSYS.