Comparative Study of Conventional and Water Circulating-Heat Sink Cooling Base Thermoelectric Generator System for Optimum Solar Thermal Waste Heat Recovery

Abstract

A novel technique for waste heat recovery in solar thermal power generation is investigated through experimentation and  systematically presented. Power generation using Thermoelectric Generator (TEG) is a promising technique in waste heat recovery application. In this topology, TEG array is directly attached to the back of the solar Photovoltaic panel (model AP-AM15) to receive the transmitted heat at the back of the PV panel as waste heat. More so, a circulating water-heat sink is attached to the TEG cold side to improve the temperature gradient. Base on Seebeck effect, the TEG directly converts the temperature difference into electricity. The experimental result shows that efficiency between the range of 2.1% and 4.7% for the conventional cooling system while the output power approximately ranges between 0.05W and 0.47W, the circulating water-heat sink technique has efficiency ranging between 2.9% and 10.3% with output power between the range of 0.10W and 2.2W. The daily average increase in efficiency was found to be 263.76%. This shows that the daily average power is improved by a factor of 2.6376 with the water circulating water-heat sink technique. This is an indication of waste heat recovery from the solar thermal power generation.