Peltier Thermo-Electric Generator based Standalone Micro-Power Supply System

After these many years, electricity has still not reached the remote areas of the world. Efforts are being made in this direction to develop standalone power supply systems using renewable and non-conventional power generation techniques. Thermo-electric technology is one of the non conventional alternate source for electricity generation technique, which can be suitably used in a standalone power supply system for micro loads. This paper presents a standby solution for supplying electricity to lighting loads of remote areas using Peltier based thermos-electric generators. The Peltier modules use the heat from a solar water heater to generate the required DC voltage, which is converted into AC using a simple single phase inverter to feed the lamp load.

I. Introduction

In the current scenario electricity has become the basic human necessity and the demand for electricity is continuously increasing. Apart from conventional teclmiques like hydel, thermal, nuclear etc., a lot of development has happened with regard to non renewable as well as non conventional techniques for electric power generation, like bio-mass, tidal, geo-thermal etc.