Design of stand-alone thermoelectric power generation system for marine engine exhaust system

Due to increasing energy costs and environmental concerns, there has been strong motivation for using waste heat recovery technologies in Marine application to increase the overall system efficiency. The paper proposes an energy harvesting system that could be applied to marine engine exhaust system, based on thermoelectric power generator (TEG). The TEG system is designed based on string-converter system concept in order to overcome the challenges of mismatch power losses and difficulties of operating all TEGs at their Maximum Power Point (MPP) for large-scale application. In this paper, a string converter system based on Single Ended Primary Inductor Converter (SEPIC) power converter is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed TEG system in generating electrical power from waste heat under various temperature gradient scenarios was verified using a two-string power converter system prototype. Experimental results clearly show that the proposed converter system is able to extract 24% more power from the waste heat source compared to a conventional single converter system.