Numerical analysis of liquid jet impingement cooling of a thermoelectric generator

Abstract

Designs of heat exchangers are quite often disconnected to the performance of thermoelectric generators (TEG). In this work, the TEG and the heat exchanger are numerical modelled simultaneously in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) environment (OpenFOAM) to maximize the output power of the system while minimize the hydraulic power required. A preliminary work was done where the modelling of the heat exchanger, a single laminar slot jet, and the modelling of a 16 element TEG are validated. The considered heat exchanger is a laminar slot jet consists of a linear array of discrete heat sources which accord with the geometry of a thermoelectric generator. The considered 16 element TEG is modelled using the temperature dependent material properties which require a solution of a system of nonlinear differential equations, namely the conservation of energy and the conservation of electric current. The conjugate heat transfer OpenFOAM solver chtMultiRegionFoam is extended by an additional differential equation for the solid region to model the conservation of current. The conservation of energy is expanded by additional source terms based on Peltier/Thomson effect and Joule heat. To simplify the calculation, interface and 1D resistor load boundary conditions are developed and implemented. The heat exchanger and the TEG model, both, are validated by comparisons with measurements, where a good agreement is observed.