Design and Development of Thermoelectric Generator Kit from Car Engine Heat

To meet the increasing world demands for energy, the rate of depletion of non-renewable energy sources must be reduced while emerging alternative renewable energy sources. Renewable Energy (RE) is a clean energy that produces no harm to earth and this can be done by increasing the overall thermal efficiency of conventional power plants. Thus a study is conducted to harvesting energy by using a renewable energy such as waste heat. Most of the techniques currently available recover waste heat in the form of thermal energy which is then converted to electricity in a conventional steam power plant. Another approach which has received a little attention so far is direct conversion of thermal waste energy into electricity. The objectives include determining the method of harvesting electricity from car engine heat, investigating the operational of Thermoelectric Generator (TEG), correlating the TEG with circuit to drive a load and analyzed the method through Matlab/Simulink software. The study will present the summary correlated particularly to car engines heat recovery systems, introducing the key parameters, components and methods to determine the performance of such systems.