Study on the Effects of Thermoelectric Module Arrangements on the Output Power and Pressure Drop of the Stationary Engine Thermoelectric Generator Unit

This study investigates the effect of thermoelectric module (TEM) arrangements (i.e., TEM column and row quantities) on the output power and pressure drop of the thermoelectric generator unit applied on a stationary engine. Various studied cases having different numbers of TEM rows and columns are numerically analyzed in ANSYS Fluent program to determine the arrangement which has the balance between two objectives: maximizing the output power and minimizing the pressure drop. The simulation results indicate that the arrangement of TEMs significantly affects the heat transfer parameters (i.e., convection coefficient, exhaust temperature, temperature uniformity), leading to a considerable variation in the output power. However, only the number of rows noticeably affects the pressure drop. The simulation case having 3 rows and 4 columns is the optimal TEM arrangement in this study, which produces 6.94 W of total output power and 259 Pa of the pressure drop at the coolant temperature of 90°C. This study promotes the development of TEG systems having applicable TEM's quantity and arrangement to adapt for stationary engines with various power and displacement, as well as proves the necessity of analyzing the output power and pressure drop simultaneously in relevant research.