Another TEG.

[Junkie]

Heres some photo's of another TEG generator that I built. I intended it to charge a phone but it doesn't put out enough power to do that, it might because I used lower power peltiers than I did the first time (100W instead of 158W, or that the candles aren't burning as close to the peltiers before. The first one died because of overheating so I tried to be careful with the heating. The heatpipe heatsink turned out to be very good, it still gets hot but no where near as hot as the aluminium one I used before. The peltier is running a little Joule thief to power the LED's.

The finished thing.

I used rock wool insulation between the hot and cold parts to try and improve the temperature difference.

I don't have a working multimeter (I am cursed with multi meters, they constantly die on me for no reason) but as soon as I get yet another one, I'll measure the output. I want to see if it is enough to charge a ni-cad, I will be able to charge the nicad over several hours and the use that to run the phone charger.

The cooling is good, the TEG can run until the candle dies without overheating in any way. These TEG's will probably never serve any real practical use (for me at least), but they are still interesting to try.

You can see the more photo's here : TEG2

[richhagen]

That is interesting.  You must be getting about 3 volts at least to power the LED's.  That should be enough to charge several NiCad's arranged in parallel.  Once charged they could be configured in series to match your Cell phone's voltage requirement.  Probably not very efficient, if you are charging one battery to use it to charge another, but it should work.  Rich

[Junkie]

Hi rich

   I've done some testing with various loads and I'm pretty sure it will be able to charge some nicads. I've added some feet, a candle height adjustment and fitted the socket for the joule thief. See below.