ICT2014 Abstracts

Recently in terms of efficient use of energy, the renewable energy has been receiving the attention. The technology for the reuse of waste heat by the thermoelectric power generator has been developed extensively.

Lotof energy used for industrial purposes has been wasted as heat. Therefore the reuse of this waste heat by using the thermoelectric generation is expected.

As typified by the steel industry, high temperature heat is used in the metal refining industries, and huge amount of its heat has been wasted. Therefore the metal refining industry is one of the industries expected to realize efficient heat usage.

To effectively use high- temperature waste heat, the development of a thermoelectric generator for high-temperature region is essential. For this reason we fabricated the thermoelectric generator for high temperature industrial furnaces, and conducted a demonstration test on the trial device. In this test, the furnace for melting of copper was used. The inner temperature of the furnace was set to 850 ℃, and the furnace wall surface was heated to approximately 650 ℃. The thermoelectric generator was attached on the furnace wall, and the low temperature side of the device was cooled by circulating water.

The thermoelectric generator was composed of two types of thermoelectric modules connected in cascade. One type of modules was made of the oxide material that is excellent durability at high temperature. Another type of modules was made of the Bi₂Te₃ based compounds which has high generation performance in low-temperature region.

 In this test, relatively small devices were used, and the installation area of one device was 100 mm × 200 mm.  In total, four devices were placed on the wall of the furnace. The maximum output power of one device was 18[W], and the total output of four devices was 67 [W]. From these results the output power density was about 900 [W/m²].