Summary

Currently, more than 2/3rd of the fuel energy produced by an internal combustion engine (ICE) is wasted as heat without utilizing for recovery. By integrating a solid state thermo-electric generator (TEG – which converts heat to electricity directly) to the exhaust system, the overall thermal efficiency of the ICE can be improved significantly. The conversion efficiencies of TEGs are limited (around 5%) due to the unavailability of the high efficiency TE materials (high ZT) to be employed in high temperature applications i.e. exhaust gas waste heat recovery in ICE. Hence, this study focuses on development of new efficient thermo-electric materials with improved thermo-electric figure of merit (ZT) for high temperate heat recovery applications. Based on the findings of this research, engineers might be able to design efficient TEGs which would provide high conversion efficiencies. Thermal efficiencies of automobiles might be able to significantly improve by implementing such high efficient TEGs to recover the engine waste heat. Then the, specific fuel consumption of an automobile will be significantly reduced and hence, fossil fuel consumption by the automobiles can be significantly reduced. Importing efficient automobiles (those consume significantly reduced fossil fuels) to Sri Lanka will reduce the air pollution due to reduced emissions while significantly saving fuel import costs. So, finding of this research will significantly reduce the world fossil fuel consumption and GHG (greenhouse gas) emission. Findings of this research will be disseminated among the scientific community, so that the automobile manufacturers can utilize them to develop efficient TEG and efficient power train systems for automobiles.

Objectives

The aim of the research is to implement multi-scale modeling framework to develop new thermoelectric materials with enhanced performance.

1. Identify the current state of art of thermoelectric devices and determine the factors governing the efficiency.

2. Study the existing methods to enhance the performance of thermoelectric materials.

3. Developing a multi-scale modeling framework including molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory to evaluate the thermo-electric figure of merit

4. Proposing suitable thermo-electric materials for automobile waste heat recovery purposes considering the efficiency, environment friendliness and economy

Major Equipment Facilitated by Grant