Dziurdzia, P.; Bratek, P.; Markiewicz, M. An Efficient Electrothermal Model of a Thermoelectric Converter for a Thermal Energy Harvesting Process Simulation and Electronic Circuits Powering. Energies2024, 17, 204.
Dziurdzia, P.; Bratek, P.; Markiewicz, M. An Efficient Electrothermal Model of a Thermoelectric Converter for a Thermal Energy Harvesting Process Simulation and Electronic Circuits Powering. Energies 2024, 17, 204.
Dziurdzia, P.; Bratek, P.; Markiewicz, M. An Efficient Electrothermal Model of a Thermoelectric Converter for a Thermal Energy Harvesting Process Simulation and Electronic Circuits Powering. Energies2024, 17, 204.
Dziurdzia, P.; Bratek, P.; Markiewicz, M. An Efficient Electrothermal Model of a Thermoelectric Converter for a Thermal Energy Harvesting Process Simulation and Electronic Circuits Powering. Energies 2024, 17, 204.
Abstract
The paper deals with an electrothermal model of a thermoelectric converter dedicated to performing simulations of coupled thermal and electrical phenomena taking place in harvesting processes. The proposed model is used to estimate the electrical energy gain from waste heat that would be sufficient to supply electronic circuits, in particular autonomous battery-less nodes of wireless sensor networks (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The developed model is not limited to low power electronic solutions such as WSN or IoT; it can also be scaled up and applied to simulations of considerably higher thermal power conversion. In the paper, a few practical case studies are presented that show the feasibility and suitability of the proposed model for complex simultaneous simulation processes, in both electrical and thermal domains. The first example deals with a combined simulation of the electrothermal model of a thermoelectric generator (TEG) and an electronic harvester circuit based on Analog Devices’ power management integrated circuit LTC3108. The second example relates to the thermalization effect in heat sink-less harvesting applications that could be mitigated by a pulse mode operation.
Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
