7. Conclusions

The passive TEG described has no moving parts and relies on ambient air cooling. It can maintain a temperature difference (ΔT) across a series of TEMs of 76°C. In one iteration, it produces 6.9 W of steady state power with 31.2 V open circuit and 0.89 A short circuit. Successful applications include powering two microcontroller-based security cameras, one with a wireless Local Area Network (LAN) and another with cellular connectivity, as well as LED lights, a cellularinterfaced video surveillance system, and monitoring robots, while simultaneously trickle charging batteries. The most recent application was to power a complete 3G wireless security network. Future work includes optimizing the cold block to further increase the ΔT across the TEMs.
