Overview of thermoelectric generation for hybrid vehicles

With ever increasing concern on oil prices and energy conservation, there is a fast growing interest in hybrid vehicles globally. Currently, all hybrid vehicles, including micro, mild and full hybrids, adopt internal combustion engines which are inefficient in general. The corresponding waste heat of exhaust gas constitutes up to 40 % of the fuel consumption. So, it is a pressing need for researchers to develop viable energy-efficient technology to recover the waste energy of exhaust gas for hybrid vehicles. In this paper, an overview of thermoelectric waste-heat energy recovery for hybrid vehicles is presented, with emphasis on the system configuration, heat exchanger, thermoelec-tric material, power converter and maximum power point tracking