Measuring Probability of Failure of Thermoelectric Legs through Lognormal and Weibull Distribution

Thermoelectric devices are potential candidates to recover energy from dissipated waste heat and are environmentally friendly. It produces energy through temperature differences. Regarding to its fundamental characters, heat plays a significant role for effective energy conversion. At the same moment, creating high-performance thermoelectric generators at higher temperature with a reliable operational life is one of the main challenges. When the temperature of the device goes up, in order to get maximum output, the device encounters stress at his edges and within volume. This whole phenomenon makes calculation of reliability complex, especially measuring the operational life of thermoelectric device. In this paper TE materials composed of Bismuth Telluride were studied. Stress data was collected from different experiments and analyzed through Lognormal and Weibull distribution in order to calculate probability of failure of TE legs. The simulation was done on MATLAB. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.