Sustainable thermoelectric power system using concentrated solar energy and latent heat storage

This paper presents a system design of sustainable thermoelectric power generator based on solar concentrator and latent heat storage as a passive heating and cooling sources. The advantage of using thermoelectric cells is the ability to operate at high temperature (~150°C) environment with no moving parts which make it favourable for solar concentrating applications. In this present experimental rig, paraffin wax is selected as the phase change material (PCM) for absorbing the dissipated heat from the cold side of the thermoelectric module at 60x solar concentrations. The indoor experiment has shown that the proposed system is able to generate about 4W of thermoelectricity using two small off-the-shelves thermoelectric cells. This proposal can be used as a remote sustainable power system as it is fully operated in a passive mean.