The General-Purpose Heat Source Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator: A Truly General-Purpose Space RTG

Realising the potential of thermoelectric technology: a Roadmap

“…In the aerospace sector, radioisotope TEGs have been used by NASA for over 50 years for a variety of missions and craft; latterly these have included the Mars Rover, Curiosity, the Galileo satellites, New Horizons space probes, and Cassini spacecraft. 63 Commercial and military aircraft already use sensors and sensor networks powered by thermoelectric generators to monitor the aircraft skin for damage that can cause stresses and structural weakness. 64 A traditional bismuth telluride TEG generating 20 to 30 mW of power from the heat of normally operating turbine engine bearings, would be enough to power a network of embedded sensors.…”

Cost optimization of thermoelectric materials for power generation: The case for ZT at (almost) any cost

“…In real devices the minimal values of L and F are limited by parasitic phenomena that are well known, but are commonly neglected [8,9] Aggressive reductions in F min will be limited by the thermal spreading resistance in the ceramic plates that join the thermoelectric legs to the heat exchanger. NASA's highly-successful GPHS-RTG uses F=0.034 [21], and F min down to 0.01 has been suggested as still practical using high thermal conductivity plates [8], which is the value depicted in Fig. 2.…”

Investigation of miniaturized radioisotope thermionic power generation for general use

“…An alternative to this paradigm is to adapt a well-established technology used in deep space probe applications. The radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) is the current power source for probes such as Pioneer, 2 Voyager, 3 Cassini, and New Horizons, 4 providing consistent power for several decades. The RTG "fuel" is a few kilograms of Pu 238 , a radioactive isotope with a half-life of about 87 years.…”