Study on the Influence of Structural Parameters of Semiconductor Thermoelectric Units on Power Generation Characteristics

Abstract

Semiconductor thermoelectric technology has received increasing attention from researchers at home and abroad. In this paper, the semiconductor thermoelectric unit is taken as the research object, when the temperature difference (heat source temperature 523K and cold source temperature 323K) remains unchanged, considering the variable properties of semiconductor materials, ANSYS WORKBENCH numerical simulation is used to study the influence of structural parameters (geometrical shape, length and cross-sectional side length) of thermoelectric couple on the power generation performance of the thermoelectric unit. The results of numerical simulation show that (i) The peak output power has the maximum value, which increases first and then decreases with the increase of the thermoelectric couple length, and the conversion efficiency decreases with the increase of the thermoelectric couple length; (ii) The output power increases with the increase of cross-sectional side length, while the conversion efficiency decreases slowly; (iii) With the increase of chamfer, the output power decreases and the conversion efficiency increases. The findings of this work may provide a guide to the load matching, theoretical analysis and configuration optimization design of thermoelectric generators.