Empirical feasibility assessment of energy scavenging opportunity in compact mobile computers

The opportunity of thermoelectric energy scavenging from waste heat of a compact and thermally limited notebook computer is experimentally studied in this paper. Thermal characterization of the target computer is done under a range of workloads/activity levels. A detailed finite element model of the system is developed for thermal simulations and the results are validated by the ones obtained in the thermal characterization. A suitable spot is selected based on the finite element model for integration of thermoelectric module into the cooling solution without impacting the system performance, as measured by thermal changes in the simulation model. A significant difference of approximately 22 °C is observed between the hot and cold side of thermoelectric module when the system is executed at maximum workload resulting in a net power generation of 410.5 µW. The generated power scales down to 60.5 µW when the system is idle. It has been verified through lab experiments that the integration of thermoelectric module to a thermally limited notebook system can be done without any substantial degradation in performance.