Performance analysis of wet flue-gas thermoelectric generator

Flue gas is generated by the combustion of natural gas, biomass fuel, and domestic waste in boilers. It contains a large amount of water vapor that provides high potential heat. In this paper, a thermoelectric generator is proposed to recover this heat. A mathematical model is established to analyze the power generation parameters, taking into consideration the characteristics of the wet flue gas. The results showed that when the wet flue gas condenses, both the output power and the efficiency curves show an inflection owing to the increase in the heat transfer coefficient. The use of wet flue gas increased the maximum output power by multiple times compared to that of the dry flue gas. Furthermore, the influence of the humidity of flue gas, and the exhaust gas temperature on power generation is analyzed. It was observed that the maximum output power can be increased with the increase of both the humidity and the flue gas temperature.