Date of Award

12-2016

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

First Advisor

Dr. HoSung Lee

Second Advisor

Dr. Christopher Cho

Third Advisor

Dr. Bade Shrestha

Keywords

Low grade waste heat recovery, thermoelectric generator, optimal design, liquid-to-liquid configuration, experimental validation

Access Setting

Masters Thesis-Open Access

Abstract

The use of thermoelectric generators (TEGs) for producing electricity from low grade waste heat is thought to be a great solution in the future to reduce the power generation cost because of their advantages of reliability and environmental friendliness. Therefore, the current project aims to study thermoelectric generators for low grade waste heat recovery. In this work, a single unit cell of liquid to liquid thermoelectric generator attached with heat exchangers (heat sinks) is modeled using an internal flow. Its optimum design is obtained based on heat sink optimization and the optimal design method. An analytical model of four unit cells system is simulated by combining the isolation method with the non-dimensional technique where the optimum parameters are obtained from the unit cell optimal design. Finally, to verify the accuracy of modeling the four unit cells system (whole system), an experiment is conducted. The experimental results are in reasonably good agreement with the analytical results.

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