(Elsevier, 2017) Araiz Vega, Miguel; Martínez Echeverri, Álvaro; Astrain Ulibarrena, David; Aranguren Garacochea, Patricia; Mekanika, Energetika eta Materialen Ingeniaritza; Institute for Advanced Materials and Mathematics - INAMAT2; Ingeniería Mecánica, Energética y de Materiales
An important issue in thermoelectric generators is the thermal design of the heat exchangers since it can improve their performance by increasing the heat absorbed or dissipated by the thermoelectric modules. Due to its several advantages, compared to conventional dissipation systems, a thermosyphon heat exchanger with phase change is proposed to be placed on the cold side of thermoelectric generators. Some of these advantages are: high heat-transfer rates; absence of moving parts and lack of auxiliary con- sumption (because fans or pumps are not required); and the fact that these systems are wickless. A com- putational model is developed to design and predict the behaviour of this heat exchangers. Furthermore, a prototype has been built and tested in order to demonstrate its performance and validate the compu- tational model. The model predicts the thermal resistance of the heat exchanger with a relative error in
the interval [?8.09;7.83] in the 95% of the cases. Finally, the use of thermosyphons with phase change in thermoelectric generators has been studied in a waste-heat recovery application, stating that including them on the cold side of the generators improves the net thermoelectric production by 36% compared to that obtained with finned dissipators under forced convection.
