Thermal design and management for performance optimization of solar thermoelectric generator

A real-sized three-dimensional numerical model of thermoelectric generators at a given thermal input and matched load resistance

“…Montecucco and Knox [16] calculated the thermal and electrical dynamics of TEG system to study transients and steady-state operation of real TE systems. Xiao et al [17] established a solar TEG model which contains multi-stage TE pairs to optimize the output performance. Liao et al [18] used two simulation models to calculate the thermal temperature and power generation of a thermoelectric-solar hybrid energy system exposed to dynamic transient sources.…”

Parameter optimization of thermoelectric modules using a genetic algorithm

“…The aforementioned publications can be divided into contributions to increase or observe the mechanical stability [5,6], the electrical power output [14][15][16][17]19] or both [7,8,10,12,13]. It can be concluded that only a few researchers are addressing the introduced conflict in objectives which is inherent for TEM.…”

“…The calculation and optimization of the electric power output was done by Seifert et al in a one-dimensional approach for TE coolers and generators [14], whereas the influence of stacked generators with varying TE materials on the electric power output was examined by El Genk and Saber [15], Xiao et al [16] and Liang et al [17]. They revealed that an increase of both, the power output and the conversion efficiency is possible by using stacked generators.…”

Dimensional Analysis of Thermoelectric Modules Under Constant Heat Flux

“…However, because the temperature distribution is not homogeneous over the TE module, it is impossible to solve the simultaneous derivative equations in the analytical way as reported previously [12,13]. In this work the simultaneous derivative equations are numerically evaluated, based on the well-studied finite-volume method (FVM) and an original routine as the simultaneous solver among heat transfer and thermo-electric transportation phenomena [4,[14][15][16][17][18][19]. This routine was 6 originally developed by Chen et al [16,17] and implanted to our group.…”