Hello,

I am pretty new to the thermo electric effect, and have some questions.

Thermo electric generation seems to mainly happen at a small scale, is there any particular reason for this? or is there no size restriction to these TEG elements ?

If I were to build my own custom sized TEG, what materials should i use?

I am a student and wish to do research on electricity generation through heat differentials. The place where I am going to do this research has some heat exchangers of which a few are used for waste heat. It would be great if I could assemble thermo electric generators inside them.

Another few questions I have are about ambient air cooling.
The surroundings where my research is going to take place has many hot surfaces. I realize that a surface wherefrom a heat flow is undesirable should not be used for thermal electric generation because it would encourage the heat flow. There are quite a few unisolated hot surfaces however, where a heat flow would not be particulary undesirable. My plan is to do a bit of research with TEG elements on these surfaces. On the cold side of the element I had planned to rig a cooling block designed for computer processor cooling, because these cooling blocks are made for a similar function and are easy to obtain. Passive cooling with ambient air is probably not a very productive plan, but since the surfaces are large could still have some economical value.
Now I am wondering: is there any advise on passive ambient air cooling? and is there anything I have missed or I should keep in mind?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you in advance.

High regards,

Remi Meijer
Engineering student from the Netherlands