Waste-Heat Energy Scavenger

Supplementary material in the form of homework and design problems are provided in pdf format.  Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view these files.  The software is free of charge. MATLAB scripts are in ".m" files, MAPLE scripts are in ".mws" files, and SIMULINK scripts are in ".mdl" files. You can view these files using any ascii text editor.

Problem Statement

Power generation and supply to MEMS devices are important constraints in enabling a number of MEMS applications.  On-chip fuel processing offers an exciting opportunity to realize small power sources with very high energy storage densities.  The power density of a fuel processing device increases with increasing temperatures, as the chemical reaction rates increase and larger fuel quantity can be processed in a given volume.  Therefore, on chip fuel processing must take place at elevated temperatures, with heat management (heat exchange, heat recovery, insulation) as the critical design consideration.

Even the best fuel processing schemes result in overall efficiencies of 30-40%.  This implies that the majority of the fuel heat content is dissipated to the environment, often in the form of low temperature gas streams.  If the heat from these process streams could be forced to travel through a thermoelectric generation device on the environment, additional electrical energy would be recovered, improving the overall device efficiency.  A MEMS thermal-waste generator could also be used to generate power in other applications, such as remote sensing near a heat source or perhaps power recovery from heat dissipation by a laptop processor.

The goal of this project is to design a thermoelectric generator which converts waste heat from a gas stream into useful electricity.

 

Download EnergyScavenger.pdf  for the full design problem description.

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