Abstract
•Wall elasticity and porosity of the channel with TEG installed system are studied.•When porous layer height and permeability are increased, TEG power rises up to 32%.•The length of porous layer in the flow direction has slight impact on TEG power.•15% increment of TEG power is obtained with nanofluid.•Computational cost is reduced from 2.5 h to 2 min with the multi-POD method.
Effects of wall elasticity and porosity of the channel on the performance characteristics of TEG module integrated system are explored numerically with finite element method. A porous layer in the lower channel is introduced with hybrid nanoparticles in the fluid. Effects of different values of elastic modulus of the top and bottom channel walls (5×103≤E1,E2≤1010), Darcy number (5×10−4≤ Da ≤5×10−1), porous layer height (0.2H ≤ py ≤ 0.8H) and length in flow direction (0.25L ≤ px ≤ 0.85L), Reynolds number (200 ≤ Re ≤ 1000) and hybrid nanoparticle volume fraction (0 ≤ϕ≤ 2%) on the convection and power generation are analyzed. The presence of elastic walls may affect the flow field in local regions but the overall impact on the power variation is slight while 2.8% variation is obtained. The presence of the porous layer altered the power generation features while increasing the permeability and height of the porous layer resulted in higher thermoelectric power generation. The increment amounts are 32% for the highest permeability and 17% for the highest porous layer height. The length of porous layer in the flow direction has slight impact on power generation features while introducing nano-sized particles further enhanced the power by about 15% at the highest ϕ. The computational cost of generated power is drastically reduced from 2.5 h for full coupled model to two minutes by using a multi-POD approach.