Abstract
Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) are widely recognized as clean energy solutions to convert low-grade waste heat into electricity. However, low output power has limited their practical applications. In this paper, we present an innovative thermoelectric system that can improve the output power by up to 130 % compared to the existing design. This system incorporates an advanced metastructure heat sink and a turbulator within the cooling system. An experimentally validated Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) − Finite Element Method (FEM) model is developed to predict the system's output voltage and power for various metastructure heat sink and turbulator configurations. Unlike existing models that assume constant temperature distribution at the cold side, our model can make more realistic temperature predictions by accounting for the effects of water flow, geometric design of heat sink and turbulator on the convective heat transfer and thermoelectric conversion. This study reveals that optimizing the geometric design of the heat sink and turbulator is an effective strategy for enhancing output power. Our thermoelectric system performs more effectively in high-temperature environments as increasing the temperature by 40 °C can lead to an additional 2.1-fold enhancement in the output power, and a high power density of 33.13 mW/cm2 compared to the commercial TEGs.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 120262 |
| Journal | Energy Conversion and Management |
| Volume | 344 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 15 2025 |
Funding
The authors acknowledge the funding support from the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society, and Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College , United States. Support from the Machine Shop of Thayer School of Engineering is also greatly appreciated. The authors would also like to thank Bowen Huang, a Dartmouth ’27 undergraduate student supported by the UGAR Program, for his assistance. This manuscript was authored in part by UT-Battelle LLC under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with DOE. The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
Keywords
- Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD)
- Finite Element Method (FEM) model
- Metastructure heat sink
- Thermoelectric generators (TEGs)