Experimental study and optimization on thermoelectric generator combined with heat pipe-heat sink

• Main Author: Elghool, Ali Elhade
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: TJ Mechanical engineering and machinery
• Online Access: http://umpir.ump.edu.my/id/eprint/34449/1/Experimental%20study%20and%20optimization%20on%20thermoelectric.pdf; http://umpir.ump.edu.my/id/eprint/34449/

Thermo-Electric Generator (TEG) is presently the most pursued thermal energy harvesting technology from waste heat. In spite of that, TEG devices have been used only on a small scale, because of their low conversion efficiency. Heat sink lack of design is one reason that negatively affects the performance of TEG. As compared to conventional cooling systems which use TEG principle, Heat Pipe Heat Sink (HP-HS) has the best performance with TEG. However, the performance of TEG with HP-HS could be affected by geometry, materials and optimization of HP-HS of the TEG cold side, which are still unknown. Thus, the objective of this study is to investigate experimentally the effect of materials, the geometry of HP-HS under outdoor air speed (ODAS) in Kuala Pahang, Malaysia and forced convection (FC) at 250℃ and 300℃ hot side temperatures on the performance of TEG, as well as to optimize the parameters of HP-HS. Experimental and statistical analysis by one-factor-at-a-time method has been done to find out the effects of materials and geometry of HP-HS under ODAS and FC and TEG hot side temperature on the TEG performance. Furthermore multi-objective optimization using response surface methodology (RSM) is applied to determine the optimum geometry of HP-HS and materials in terms of maximizing the TEG power output (P), TEG efficiency (η), and minimizing HP-HS cost ($