Prediction of the fuel economy potential for a skutterudite thermoelectric generator in light-duty vehicle applications

Song Lan, Zhijia Yang, Richard Stobart and Rui Chen

Applied Energy, 2018, vol. 231, issue C, 68-79

Abstract: Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) have the characteristics of low maintenance, silent operation, stability, and compactness, which make them outstanding devices for waste heat recovery in light-duty vehicles. Significant strides have been made in the high temperature (300–800 °C) thermoelectric materials and recent work is beginning to translate those material improvements into TEG performance. Recently developed modules that incorporate new, competitive formulations of skutterudite form the basis for this study. Vehicular TEGs have not had real commercial applications yet and faced commercialization challenges. Simply estimating the fuel saving potential from the TEG output is not sufficient and due consideration must also be given to the system integration effects. Thus, a new approach for predicting the fuel saving potential of a vehicular TEG while also considering integration effects is developed in this paper. The prediction is based on a recently developed high temperature skutterudite thermoelectric modules [1]. Based on this method, the benefit of a skutterudite TEG is investigated by balancing the benefits with the added complexity of a TEG and improvement measures are explored.

Keywords: Skutterudite; Thermoelectric generator; Light-duty vehicles; Fuel economy; Integration effects; Waste heat recovery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.09.087

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