Design and Implementation of Hybrid Photovoltaic-thermoelectric System with Intelligent Power Supply Management

A photovoltaic thermoelectric hybrid (PV-TEH) system with intelligent power supply management is proposed in this paper. Combining the advantages of the thermoelectric generator (TEG) and the thermoelectric cooler (TEC), the TE intelligent switching circuit and the water speed regulation circuit are presented in this system. Due to the energy harvesting of the TE devices, the high conversion efficiency can be realized in the PV-TEG mode. The experimental results show that the output power of the PV cell in our work is increased by 14.4% on average compared with that in a PV system without IE. Since the proposed system overcomes the disadvantage of power consumption for TEC throughout the whole process, the electrical energy generated by the TEG is effectively harvested, achieving 57.9% improvement of the overall energy conversion efficiency over the PV-TEC system. This intelligent energy harvesting and thermal management by employing TE as generator and cooller with the multiplexed technique can provide a reference for self-power electronic equipment. Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)