Influence of different cooling methods on thermoelectric performance of an engine exhaust gas waste heat recovery system

Wei He, Shixue Wang, Chi Lu, Xing Zhang and Yanzhe Li

Applied Energy, 2016, vol. 162, issue C, 1258 pages

Abstract: Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) present good potential applications for the conversion of low level thermal energy into electrical power, especially applied to waste heat recovery systems. This paper presents an advanced mathematical model that uses multi-element thermoelectric components connected in series, and considers internal and external irreversibility and also the temperature gradients along the flow direction. A Fortran computation program was used for the numerical calculations. This paper focusses mainly on the thermoelectric performance study under four different types of cooling methods with temperature gradient modeling. The results showed that it is important in TEG system design to choose an optimal module area that is appropriate to the mass flow rate of the fluids, but this is not affected by the intake temperature of fluids. With the water cooling method, the coflow and counterflow methods did not need to be distinguished because of their small difference, but they should be distinguished for the air cooling method. The counterflow arrangement generally produced a small higher maximum power output, but needed a much larger module area compared to the coflow method.

Keywords: Thermoelectric generator; Coflow; Counterflow; Waste heat recovery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261915003207
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:appene:v:162:y:2016:i:c:p:1251-1258

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.03.036

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

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