REVIEW ARTICLE
Research on Engine Exhaust Energy Recovery by a Heat Pipe Exchanger with a Semiconductor Thermoelectric Generator
Jun Fu*, Yuan Tang, Wei Chen, Yi Ma , Zhiguo Zhu
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 9
First Page: 130
Last Page: 140
Publisher Id: TOMEJ-9-130
DOI: 10.2174/1874155X01509010130
Article History:
Received Date: 8/1/2015Revision Received Date: 15/1/2015
Acceptance Date: 16/1/2015
Electronic publication date: 27/2/2015
Collection year: 2015
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
A heat pipe exchanger was adopted to recover the engine exhaust energy and its internal gas pressure. Velocity and temperature distribution were obtained with the computational fluid dynamics software called ‘FLUENT’. Based on the simulation results, the structure of the exchanger was improved, and its working performance was verified by experiments. The experiments showed that the pressure loss of the exchanger is only about 850 Pa, which has less influence on engine performance and is in good agreement with the simulation, as this is a more homogeneous internal air temperature distribution with better exchanger’s efficiency. And by measuring the output power under the temperatures 335 K, 355 K, 375 K and 395 K, respectively, at the cold end of the semiconductor thermoelectric generator, it was found that it had the same cold end temperature and the temperature difference was over 100 K. The output power increases rapidly at first and then continues to grow but at a decreasing rate, and the largest output power is 75.6 W when the cold end temperature is 335 K with the temperature difference of 380 K, and in addition to this it was observed that under the same temperature difference, the lower cold end temperature is the larger the output power.
