Exploring the prospects of thermoelectric power generation in conjunction with a water heating system

Amir Y. Faraji, H.J. Goldsmid, C. Dixon and A. Akbarzadeh

Energy, 2015, vol. 90, issue P2, 1569-1574

Abstract: Thermoelectric generators have long been recognized as a unique energy conversion device due to their capability to convert heat directly into electricity with no moving parts. Nevertheless, engineering applications of these solid-state devices, apart from specialised situations, have been limited by the relatively low intrinsic conversion efficiency of the thermoelectric materials. Many efforts have been made over recent years to improve the conversion efficiency of thermoelectric materials by increasing their figure-of-merit, with only marginal success. The authors recently introduced a novel combination of thermoelectric generators and liquid heaters to carry our two tasks in a manner that compensates for the low efficiency drawback of thermoelectric generators. The idea is to operate the thermoelectric generator in a symbiotic arrangement (a certain configuration of a combined heat and power generation mode – cogeneration) which consists of a stacked assembly of several thermoelectric modules sandwiched between cold and hot liquid passages appropriately connected to an ordinary liquid (e.g. water) heater. It was shown that the system can produce heat and electricity with nearly zero heat dissipation to the surroundings by re-using rejected heat from thermoelectric modules for inlet liquid preheating.

Keywords: Thermoelectric; Power generation; Symbiotic; Water heating; Cogeneration; Low grade heat (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544215008774
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:90:y:2015:i:p2:p:1569-1574

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2015.06.121

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().