Study Of The Thermoelectric Power Generator For Vehicle Exhaust

With the exhaustion of traditional energy source, people are paying more and moreattention to the development of new energy. The development of new high efficientthermoelectric materials has made thermoelectric technology one of the hot areas,especially in applying to the power generation from vehicle exhaust. A wholethermoelectric power system for vehicle exhaust needs knowledge ranging from materials,mechanics, to electronics. In this paper, we mainly focused on the following aspects:(1)Rather than a device specially designed for a certain vehicle, we designed a modularthermoelectric fin-unite device to study the power generation capacity of different vehicles.The computing software CFX was adopted to fulfill the simulation and the results can beused as reference for system quick design.(2) The effect of connection modes amongthermoelectric modules in a system was studied by using MATLAB calculation. The resultsshowed that systems in different connection modes but with the same working temperaturedifference could reach almost the same maximum output power and maximum efficiency.However, the systems would reach their maximum output at different voltage and currentcombination. Also, the connection modes could strongly affect the internal resistances ofthe systems. Thus we must design the connection mode based on our required outputcharacteristics.(3) The thermal induced stress in a thermoelectric module was studied byusing ANSYS software and adopting thermal-electric-structure multiple fields couplingmethod. Then an improvement was proposed, which would reduce the maximum stress by30%. This improvement would greatly increase the reliability of thermoelectric module.