Thermo-electric Power Generator from Waste Heat

Mechanical Engineering

The current worldwide trend of increasing transportation is responsible for increasing the use of internal combustion engines. I.C engines, the devices with a high energy usage and low efficiency because roughly 65% of the energy produced during combustion is lost in the exhaust and in the coolant of the engine in the form of heat. As a huge amount of energy is lost, there is urgent need to design a advice to trap this loss. This paper proposes and implements a waste heat recovery system using a thermoelectric generator (TEG) designed for four strokes I.C. engine. The system converts the waste heat from the exhaust manifold into electrical energy using a TEG. The output is then boosted by a Joule Thief converter to run the required load or to charge a battery. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system recovers considerable amount of waste heat which can be used to power some auxiliary automobile devices.

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