Multi-physics Simulation of Thermoelectric Generators Through Numerically Modeling

The governing equations taken from the assumption of local equilibrium and the heat transfer rate form of Onsager flux have been compared with those based on classical heat transfer formulation by a simplified one dimensional (1-D) thermoelectric generator (TEG) model. In this paper, the simulation of coupled multi-physics effects in a TEG is realized in a three dimensional (3-D) way, based on the heat transfer formulation, through finite-difference numerical method and PSPICE computational tool. The feature to take the real temperature dependence of the materials properties into account is included in the computation.