Date of Award

3-19-2020

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Systems Engineering

First Advisor

Lawrence Whitman

Second Advisor

Tony Hall

Abstract

In this dissertation, we present a unique system working as a generator that takes the advantage of waste heat dissipation from an application to generate electricity by induction. This system can be called a thermo-magneto-electric generator (TMEG), because it deals with a heat source, heat sink, and magnetic field generated by a permanent magnet (PM) and works to generate voltage by induction. The magnetic energy is the resource power of this system due to the existence of the magnetic material (ferromagnetic), and the reason of the movement is the change in the amount of magnetic energy repeated by the change in the temperature of the ferromagnetic material. The critical point of changing the magnetic material’s state depends on the material itself which is called the Curie temperature (TC). This study models the TMEG technique with some experimental cases for validation purposes. Modeling cases were accomplished using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.2a software due to its ability to meet all the requirements including the ability to simulate the system with moving parts. The dissertation included several cases depending on the design of the TMEG technique starting from the basics and presented applications including some cases optimized to enhance performance. Two factors increase the scale of enhancement which are the frequency and the amount of heat dissipation. All cases showing improvement focused on these two factors. The power generated in the system can be determined depending on the modeling results. The maximum power generation through this device is about 1.5 ????W according to the optimization results. A large number of TMEG units can be arranged in rows and columns in one square meter to generate about 18 mW/m2. This technique can be fixed at the back of a solar panel to cool it and make it work to maximum efficiency. The number of units that are needed depends on solar radiation intensity and atmospheric temperatures to keep its temperature close to 20Co. The impact of this dissertation may be evident in the near future, whether in terms of manufacturing such systems, studying them, and developing them,

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