Design and performance study of the heat exchanger of a fin-based thermoelectric generator via numerical simulations

Abstract

Climate change is a latent concern nowadays, so the ONU proposed to adopt new alternatives for obtaining energy through clean and renewable energies; that is why the TEG (Thermoelectric Generator) have been used in different industries and vehicles as they are a system that recovers and uses the waste heat from automobile exhaust gases for waste heat recovery; therefore, it is a method that allows improving energy efficiency. The present study aims to design and study the performance of the heat exchanger of a fin-based thermoelectric generator via numerical simulations. In this way, the geometry was performed using SolidWorks software. In addition, the meshing and boundary conditions were established in ANSYS Fluent to obtain the initial temperature distributions. Additionally, these initial temperature distributions serve as boundary conditions for ANSYS Thermal-Electric to obtain the semiconductor's final temperature distributions, voltage distributions, and electric current distributions. It was obtained as a result that the semiconductor's temperature distributions reached a voltage of 80 mV in 1 second of heat transfer. Also, the droplets fin-base TEG had an average temperature of 36.85 °C on the cold side and 163.3 °C on the hot side. Finally, it was concluded that the semiconductor’s final temperature distributions of the hot and cold side for the droplets fin-base TEG presented higher uniformity than the parallel plate fin-base TEG.