Slowing down the increase of the energy consumption's is one of
the main challenge of this decade.
Transporting is one of the biggest energy consuming sector. So, to
increase the efficiency of our vehicles, energy harvesting has
become more and more widespread in the transports' study field.
According to literature, during breaking, an heavy vehicle can
waste from 400 to 3000 [kW] mostly converted into heat. That
suggest that a large energy recuperation might be possible in this
area.
However, finding an energy harvesting technology at a scale of
our braking system may seem problematic, since most of them as
scalability problems.
Thermoelectric generator (TEG), might match this problematic.
After carring out several experiments to understand and
analyse the heat behavior and the energy recovery in different
brake pads, we finaly find out that our concept of using a TEG to to
recover waste energy is not adaptable to a medium range car.
But making some improvements and using it in bigger vehicles
could still be an interesting field of investigation.