The types and the characteristics of the waste heat on hypersonic vehicles and the application feasibility of thermoelectric generators (TEGs) for hypersonic aircraft are discussed in this paper. Two thermoelectric generator schemes with an isothermal heat source and a variable temperature heat source were proposed, and the corresponding models were developed to predict the performance of the waste heat recovery systems on a hypersonic vehicle with different heat sources. The thermoelectric efficiency variation with electric current, the temperature distribution of fuel and junctions, and the distribution of the thermoelectric figure of merit ( ZT value) are described by diagrams. Besides, some improvements for a better performance are analyzed. The results indicate that the maximum values of thermoelectric efficiency are 5% and 2.5% for the isothermal heat source and the variable temperature heat source, respectively, and the thermoelectric efficiency improves with the temperature of the hot junction. The performance of the TEGs with variable temperature heat source is worse than that of the other TEGs under the same highest hot junction temperature conditions, and the former has a better conversion efficiency than the latter when the average temperatures are identical.
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