Model development and performance evaluation of thermoelectric generator with radiative cooling heat sink

Abstract Thermoelectric generator has been widely used to recover power from various heat sources. But limited attention has been paid to heat exchange from the cold side of thermoelectric generator. In this work, a novel thermoelectric generator with radiative cooling heat sink (TEG-RCHS) is developed to investigate the power generation performance with convective cooling and radiative cooling. The corresponding mathematical model is developed to investigate the impact factors on the performance of the TEG-RCHS module and the results indicate that wind speed and heater temperature have the positive impact, while atmospheric humidity and ambient temperature play the negative role on the power generation. Additionally, radiative cooler with spherical cap can help the TEG-RCHS module increase the heat exchange area, thus the module can achieve the higher power generation than the thermoelectric generator with aluminum heat sink (TEG-AHS) module and simultaneously have little impact on the actual application. During the operation modeling, the total power generation of the developed TEG-RCHS module is about 32% higher than that of the TEG-AHS module in arid Lanzhou, China. Additionally, convective cooling, ambient radiative cooling and sky radiative cooling account for the similar proportions, indicating the great importance of ambient radiative cooling and sky radiative cooling. Our developed TEG-RCHS module has great application potential, especially in electronic equipment, due to higher power generation performance and smaller footprint.