Paper Title
Experimental Study on Performance of Solar Thermoelectric Generator with a Dome-Shaped Glass Cover
Abstract
A low-cost solar collector with a dome-shaped glass cover was fabricated in this study to measure its performance. No special treatment was done to the surface of the absorber to see the actual electrical performance when using adome-shaped glass cover instead of flat glass. The material for the absorber is made of carbon steel and the area that faces the radiation was naturally oxidized to black color to reduce the level of reflectance. The prototype was tested under both simulator (indoor) and real environment (outdoor) which yield results of Tmax of 57.95oC under ambient temperature (33.26oC ± 1.81 s.d.)for real environment and Tmax equal to 54.4oC when tested under simulator. Considering the use of small collecting area (0.0016m2) and without any proper heating enhancer together with the used of only a piece of 40mmx40mm thermoelectric module, the system can generate up to5.04x10-3% efficiency in average with standard deviation 1.10x10-3 throughout the day. Keywords - Flat-panel Thermoelectric Generator, Solar Thermoelectric