Exergetic assessment of a concentrated photovoltaic-thermoelectric system with consideration of contact resistance

Despite extensive studies on concentrated photovoltaic-thermoelectric systems, exergy analysis has not been given much attention. Herein, a comprehensive exergy analysis of a concentrated photovoltaic-thermoelectric system is presented. The results showed that increasing the number of thermoelectric modules in the system reduces the exergy destruction in the system, thereby improves the exergy efficiency. Likewise, performance of an individual thermoelectric module reduces with increase in the number of thermoelectric modules in the system. While increasing the contact resistance from 0% to 100% of internal resistance of the thermoelectric modules reduces the exergy efficiency of the thermoelectric modules by 50%.