Air-cooled thermoelectric generator

Abstract Thermoelectric power units composed of the oxide thermoelectric modules, which show excellent durability against high temperature have been developed and tested. The water-cooled systems including the cascaded modules generated 2.5–3.0 kW/m2 in the demonstration tests on the industrial furnace and the incinerator. No obvious degradation of the oxide modules was detected by the tests. The conversion efficiency of the water-cooled system was 5.2% against the heat flux through the modules. Although water cooling is effective to generate high output power, the electricity to cool the water should be necessary more than the generated output power. Many potential users of the thermoelectric generators prefer to the air-cooled systems to the water-cooled ones. The air-cooled power systems using the oxide modules indicate the potentiality for the small power sources. Especially, the application as the power sources for the IoT devices expected significant market in the near future requires the air-cooled power generation.