Studies on Temperature Variation in Automotive Exhaust Thermoelectric Generator with Exhaust Pipe Length

Sarthak Nag; Surya Bharathi Thangavelu; Gaurav  Tripathi; Atul  Dhar; Arpan  Gupta

Authors

Sarthak Nag School of Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, Kamand-175 005, Himachal Pradesh, India
Surya Bharathi Thangavelu Department of Mechanical Engineering, SSN College of Engineering, Kalavakkam-603 110, Tamil Nadu, India
Gaurav Tripathi School of Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, Kamand-175 005, Himachal Pradesh, India
Atul Dhar School of Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, Kamand-175 005, Himachal Pradesh, India
Arpan Gupta School of Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, Kamand-175 005, Himachal Pradesh, India

Keywords:

thermoelectric generators, automotive exhaust thermoelectric generator heat exchanger, internal combustion engine, waste heat recovery, CFD modelling

Abstract

Thermoelectrictechnology has good potential for its application as automotive exhaust based thermoelectric generator (TEG). In this work, the temperature variation on the surface of the automotive exhaust thermoelectric generator (AETEG) heat exchanger has been studied.The surface of heat exchanger acts as base for applying TEG modules to recover waste heat from the exhaust. Experiments have been carried out by varying the distance of the AETEG heat exchanger from the engine exhaust side by increasing pipe’s length. In addition to it, the load on the engine was also varied to study its effects. These experimental results have been validated by simulating the same cases in CFD solver Star CCM. The experimental results show good agreement with the computed results. Simulation and experiments, both reveal that the variation in length of the pipe has very little effect on the temperature distribution on AETEG, however increasing the load increases the temperature on AETEG due to the increase in exhaust temperature. The maximum voltage and power output was also estimated for a specific TEG module which came out to be 7.12 V and 15.58 W at 30% load condition.