Enhancement of cooling design on the performance of thermoelectric Generator

DOI

10.2991/ic3me-15.2015.87How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Thermoelectric generator; Jet impinging cooling; Numerical simulation

Abstract

Thermoelectric generators(TEG) is considered as a promising technology for utilizing low-grade thermal energy, while the cooling system plays a key role in TEG. A two-dimensional numerical model of jet impinging jet cooling is developed based on the commercial code FLUENT. The influences of several factors on thermoelectric conversion efficiency are observed. The factors include the air inlet velocity, the TE legs height, and the fins. The results show that the air inlet velocity is one of the most important factors for the cooling performance, the convection heat transfer efficiency and conversion efficiency significantly increases with the improvement of the air velocity. Higher TE legs height can influence the TEG performance effectively, 5~7mm legs height is recommended in this study. And fins can effectively increase the TEG efficiency, the thermoelectric conversion efficiency with 1mm×1mm fins is 6.73% which was 2.4 times higher than without fins.

Copyright

© 2015, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Changqing Guo
AU  - Changfeng Yan
AU  - Xiaoyong Zhao
PY  - 2015/08
DA  - 2015/08
TI  - Enhancement of cooling design on the performance of thermoelectric Generator
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Material, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 441
EP  - 446
SN  - 2352-5401
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/ic3me-15.2015.87
DO  - 10.2991/ic3me-15.2015.87
ID  - Guo2015/08
ER  -