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Old 06-24-2012, 04:25 PM   #5 (permalink)
Ryland
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Location: Western Wisconsin
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honda cb125 - '74 Honda CB 125 S1
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Yugomodder is dead on, Solar is down to $1.35 per watt and TEG's are around $15 per watt and are very fussy, to cold and their output is pretty low, to hot and they burn up and are destroyed.
Heat from the radiator would be near the ideal temp but it takes many miles for it to warm up and in that time they are going to produce very little power and these short trips make up most of the average persons trips in a car.
Only 5-7% of the energy that is passing thru a TEG is being turned in to electricity and if you don't get rid of that heat then the performance drops as well! so while the hot side needs to be around 180-200F the cool side needs to be kept as cool as possible and the spec numbers tend to be around 80F, so you need some massive heat sinks to dissipate that heat!

In the peltier coolers, the reason that both sides get hot after you turn it off is because so much of the energy that you are putting in to the unit is being turned in to heat, lets say you put 100 watts of energy in and you get 300 watts of heat out because you moved 200 watts of heat away from the cold side to make it cold and in doing so you produced 100 watts of heat that also had to be pulled away from that cold side, so as soon as you stop pulling that heat from one side to the other the whole thing gets hot, now don't quote me on those figures I mentioned, because I don't remember if a 100 watt really can move 200 watts of energy or not but I from what I remember it seems pretty close.
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