The initial transient behavior of a thermoelectric generator

Efficiency and steady-state behavior of thermoelectric devices have been treated in the literature.1¿3 More recently, considerable work has been done on the transient behavior of incremental variations about a quiescent operating point.4 The procedure used avoids the inherent nonlinearities of the problem by creating a linearized mathematical model, and it can be extended to many problems of the small-signal case. However, there are certain problems which this method will not handle, the main one of which is large-signal dynamic behavior. A particularly important example is the problem of the start-up transient of a thermoelectric generator under load, which is discussed in this paper.