Influence of Heat Collection Plate Structure on Thermoelectric Generation Unit Performance for Radiant Waste Heat Recovery in Continuous Casting Process

Abstract

In recent years, environmental issues such as global warming and the energy resource depletion have become serious matters. Waste heat recovery can be one of the key technologies to solve these issues. Thermoelectric generator (TEG) is one of the promising technologies expected to play an important role for steel plant's waste heat recovery, particularly radiant heat from steel products which had not been used yet efficiently. Despite the improved performances of thermoelectric materials, more effort on a TEG unit is needed to maximize TEG system performance. In optimizing the TEG unit performance, the influence of the surface shape of the TEG units has been investigated. Two types of the heat collection plate have tested. The first one was with a fin structure and the second one was with plain plate structure. Based on the results of the simulation and the experiments, it can be concluded that a better performance will be achieved by the TEG unit which has plain type heat collection plate because of larger total heat flux input to TEG modules of the TEG unit with plain type heat collection plate structure compared to the fin type heat collection structure.