Experimental investigation of combined heat recovery and power generation using a heat pipe assisted thermoelectric generator system

•A new passive combined heat recovery and power generation system was tested.•Heat pipes and thermoelectrics were used for recovering industrial waste heat.•The system could recover approximately 1079 W of heat and produce approximately 7 W of electric power.

This paper explores a new method of recovering industrial waste heat and conversion to electricity using a Thermo-Electric Generator (TEG). For this purpose, a lab scale bench-top prototype of waste heat recovery and electricity conversion system was designed and fabricated. This bench top system consists of Bismuth Telluride (Bi2Te3) based TEG sandwiched between two heat pipes. The first heat pipe was connected to the hot side of the TEG and the second to the cold side of TEG. The waste heat was simulated by using a 2 kW electric heater for heating the air in the system. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the system performance in terms of the heat transfer rate, heat exchanger effectiveness, and maximum output power. It was found that the highest heat exchanger effectiveness of 41% was achieved when the airspeed was set at 1.1 m/s. The system could recover around 1079 W of heat and produce around 7 W of electric power. This equated to 0.7% of thermal-to-electric conversion efficiency. The theoretical predictions showed good agreement compared to the experimental results.