A new low-cost water loop suitable for bite thermogenerators.

JUANICÓ, L.E.; RINALDE G F; TAGLIALAVORE, E.

Aalborg

Congreso; 31th International & 10th European Conference on Thermoelectric; 2012

Aalborg Universitet

Although many effort have been made to develop prototypes of thermogenerators for electrification of rural households isolated and/or for reusing waste heat from different heat sources, up today there is only a single well-established commercial market for thermoelectric generators. This niche market for the Gas&Oil industry is supplied almost exclusively by Global Thermoelectric (GTE), the Canadian enterprise manufacturing and worldwide selling thermogenerators since 1975. GTE utilizes its own technology of high-temperature (up to 600C) BiPb modules carried out by 3M in the 60s for Apollo project. The use of high-temperature modules allows GTE to design a small cooling system, since it works about 130C and so, keeping a high temperature jump with ambient outdoor. On the other hand, the use of BiTe modules available in open market like Tellurex ones, working on moderate temperature (up to 175C), implies a major challenge for developing a new thermogenerator regarding its cooling system. Here, the working temperature of the cooling system must be markedly lower than in the previous case in order to get a reasonable output power, and conversely the cooling system will be markedly greater. In this paper is presented a new design of cooling system intended for working on low-temperature BiTe modules. It is a low-cost modular design, based on the use of home hot-water radiators on a free-convection water loop. The thermal simulation and cost analysis show that this design allow us to develop an economically competitive generator (50,000U$D/kW) and even better (20,000U$D/kW) when the new (320C) Tellurex modules are utilized. The fully development of prototype and its experimental characterization will be presented in another work.