Experimental and numerical study on energy harvesting performance thermoelectric generator applied to a screw compressor

Abstract In this paper, an experimental and numerical investigation of thermoelectric generator for energy harvesting performance of screw compressors has been studied. The sources of heat recovery from compressors are recognized and a heat exchanger to mount the Thermoelectric Generator (TEG) module assembly is designed to adapt for implementation in this work. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to find out the temperature distribution in the heat exchanger and experimental work is carried out to validate CFD results. The heat exchangers, consisting of five TEG modules, temperature profile and voltage value have been studied numerically and experimentally. The parametric study has been studied to understand the influence of various system parameters on energy harvesting performance TEG based heat exchanger. An average of 1.6 V is generated by each TEG module and heat exchanger consists of five TEG and an average of 8 V is generated continuously by the heat exchanger. Also, it is proved that the usages of steel foam with 90 % porosity in heat exchanger improves the heat transfer rate and maximize the output from 8 V to 24 V in heat exchanger.