Performance Analysis of Thermoelectric Modules Using Polyhedron Elements

Our previous work showed that the utilization of polyhedron elements has better advantages than the parallelogram elements in the thermoelectric (TE) generation. Especially a high efficiency of converting heat into electricity can be achieved at an optimal shape. This study proposed new TE module configurations consisting of polyhedron elements, and examined the TE performance of them by conducting the finite-element analysis. The simulation results show that the performance of TE module in the case of symmetrically arranging the polyhedron elements is slightly higher than that of arranging elements in parallel because of the more homogeneous heat flux and current density. The heat transfer and electric resistance, respectively, depend on the module configuration and element shape, and affect the TE performance simultaneously. TE performance increases significantly when the internal resistance becomes smaller and the heat diffuses slower