Pulsating Heat Pipe and Thermo-Electric Generator Jointly Applied in Renewable Energy Exploitation : Theoretical and Experimental Investigations

Thermo-Electric Generator (TEG) could generate electricity directly from low-grade energy sources . Due to low-grade features between the required and released energy, heat pipe can be effectively utilized to promote the hot end temperature of the TEM and thus enhance its conversion efficiency. This paper explored a novel approach of recovering waste heat and conversion to electricity utilizing pulsating heat pipes (PHPs) assisted with TEGs. This bench top system was designed, manufactured and tested consists of PHP condenser sandwiched between two sets of bismuth telluride ( Bi 2 Te 3 ) based TEG. Thermo-hydrodynamic and electricity conversion performance of TEG coupled with PHPs was experimentally investigated. The research fully analyzed the effects of different working fluids, input powers, filling ratios, inclination angles and air velocities on the thermal performance and maximum outpower of PHP-TEG hybrid system by air-cooled approach. This proposed PHP-TEG system demonstrated that that the peak-to-peak amplitude of output voltage mainly depends on heat inputs and working fluids, and independent of the filling ratios; the inclination angle (from 30° to 90°) has slight effects on the heat transfer performance and thermoelectric generation of PHP-TEG hybrid system, due to the advantages of surface tension