철도 주행환경을 이용한 열전발전 모듈의 출력에 관한 연구

초록

There are various types of waste energy generated during operation of the railroad vehicles. Among them, the thermal energy from the axle box which is occurred by friction in bearings is a feasible candidate for recycling since it is persistently supplied under operation condition. Moreover, a constant temperature gradient between heat source of axle box and heat sink due to aircooling environment when driving is a good condition for thermoelectric power generation. Therefore, under assumption that a commercial thermoelectric module was applied on the axle box housing, modeling of a cooling fins was performed through computational fluid dynamics. The number of fins and heights were selected as parameters. As a result, the correlation of contact surface with the fluid and flow resistance should be optimized for maximum temperature difference in a thermoelectric module.