A Comparative Study of Thermoelectric Waste Heat Recovery in a Commercial Vehicle: Real Case Versus Simulation Model

Energy harvesting is the process of converting available environmental energy into electrical energy. In our daily lives, many things — such as vehicles and industrial machines and pieces of equipment — do not utilize all their input energy for doing work, releasing the remaining energy to the environment as heat, for example. As an example, Heavy-Duty Vehicles (HDVs) are used globally to transport loads and a significant amount of thermal energy from HDV's internal combustion engine is lost as heat through their exhaust system. A way to capture this heat is using a semiconductor Thermoelectric Generator (TEG) that converts directly heat into electrical energy. Some studies have experimentally analyzed the large-scale use of TEGs on HDV's exhaust system to harvest energy considering a combination of TEGs connections. As it is possible to explore different TEG connection combinations, but it is very expensive to evaluate all different combinations, this paper proposes a way to simulate different combinations of TEGs based on a proposed SPICE-based TEG model. The obtained result shows that using the proposed simulation approach, it is possible to evaluate a specific combination before testing it in practice.