TY - JOUR
TI - Experimental study on waste heat recovery from an IC engine using thermoelectric technology
AU - Kumar C. Ramesh
AU - Sonthalia Ankit
AU - Goel Rahul
JN - Thermal Science
PY - 2011
VL - 15
IS - 4
SP - 1011
EP - 1022
PT - Article
AB - A major part of the heat supplied in an IC engine is not realized as work  output, but dumped into the atmosphere as waste heat. If this waste heat  energy is tapped and converted into usable energy, the overall efficiency of  the engine can be improved. The percentage of energy rejected to the  environment through exhaust gas which can be potentially recovered is  approximately 30-40% of the energy supplied by the fuel depending on engine  load. Thermoelectric modules (TEM) which are used as Thermoelectric  generators (TEG) are solid state devices that are used to convert thermal  energy from a temperature gradient to electrical energy and it works on basic  principle of Seebeck effect. This paper demonstrates the potential of  thermoelectric generation. A detailed experimental work was carried to study  the performance of TEG under various engine operating conditions. A heat  exchanger with 18 TEG modules was designed and tested in the engine test rig.  Thermoelectric modules were selected according to the temperature difference  between exhaust gases side and the engine coolant side. Various designs of  the heat exchangers were modeled using CAD and analysis was done using a CFD  code which is commercially available to study the flow & heat transfer  characteristics. From the simulated results it was found that rectangular  shaped heat exchanger met our requirements and also satisfied the space and  weight constraint. A rectangular heat exchanger was fabricated and the thermo  electric modules were incorporated on the heat exchanger for performance  analysis. The study also revealed that energy can be tapped efficiently from  the engine exhaust and in near future TEG can reduce the size of the  alternator or eliminate them in automobiles.