Thermoelectric generator for stand-alone electronic device operation in temperature test cabinets

Abstract

When testing printed circuit boards in-situ in a test cabinet with a wireless connection, it is very hard to store the necessary energy, especially in a high temperature environment. With a thermoelectric generator (TEG) as an independent energy source in a climate test cabinet, the battery or the external power cable connections for the device under test (DUT) can be omitted. In this paper, we investigate the usability of a TEG in terms of how much energy can be produced by different test utilizations. To have an orientation of the maximum energy a TEG can harvest in such a cabinet, it is inevitable to create some boundary values with the equations based on the Seebeck effect. First experiment results prove that it is possible to archive enough energy to power low-energy radio transceivers for the in-situ data acquisition with a low duty cycle.