A ladder thermoelectric parallelepiped generator

The frequency and phase response of thermoelectric generators become, very important when high frequency switching or resonant DC-DC or DC-AC converters are used. The operating frequency of converters is steadily increasing during the past few years, and over 1MHz is now practical. A thermoelectric generator is often constructed from a very large number of series connected parallelepipeds of some thermoelectric material. The hot and/or cold reservoir is usually made of some electrically conductive metal, and the heat carrying fluid is to some extent conductive to the ground. This topology is equivalent to a number of small capacitors formed by each two parallelepiped crystal faces and the usually grounded thermal reservoir. We analyze the frequency behavior of such thermoelectric generators, which typically contains thousands of parallelepipeds, each generating few mill watts.