Application of thermoelectric cooler as a power generator in waste heat recovery from a PEM fuel cell – An experimental study

• We investigated the performance of TECs in waste heat recovery from a PEM fuel cell.
• A new correlation is proposed to estimate Voc in terms of water inlet temperature.
• Overall efficiency of the recovery system decreases with increasing of water temperature.
• Beyond the inlet temperature of 50 °C, the performance would be constant at 0.04%.
• TEC's conversion efficiency increases by increasing of FC-outlet water temperature.

In this paper, thermoelectric waste heat recovery from a PEM fuel cell has been experimentally investigated. For this purpose, an experimental system consisting of a heat exchanger, thermoelectric modules and a heat sink was built and tested under the operating conditions of a 5 kW PEM fuel cell system. The experimental results showed that using thermoelectric coolers can be a suitable solution for recovering waste heat from a PEM fuel cell. Moreover, this study provides an empirical relation for estimation of heat recovery system voltage using outlet water temperature of the PEM fuel cell. The results also showed that the overall efficiency of the system decreases with increasing outlet water temperature, indicating that overall efficiency depends extremely on the quality of the insulation. In addition, an optimal range was proposed for external loads to achieve maximum heat recovery and power generation from thermoelectric generators.