On the Recovery of Wasted Heat Using a Commercial Thermoelectric Device

Waste heat recovery from car's exhaust gases provides an opportunity to significantly improve the overall car engine efficiency. One approach for recovering energy from the exhaust gases is to generate electrical power through thermoelectric conversion. A thermoelectric device, using a commercially available thermoelectric generator module was made, in order to measure the gained power and efficiency at different places of the exhaust pipe of a small size car (Toyota Starlet, 1300cc), for various engine loads. With the use of a modeling approach, we evaluated the thermal contact resistances and their influence on the final device efficiency.