In recent years, the use of phase change materials (PCMs) to improve the output performance of semiconductor thermoelectric generators (TEGs) and maintain the long-term operation of TEGs has attracted extensive attention. In view of the complexity of the existing PCM-TEG combination and the lack of unified understanding, a mathematical model of PCM-TEG coupling was established, and the system performance of PCM when the PCM was arranged on the hot, cold and bilateral sides of the TEG was compared, and the skeleton PCM design was proposed and its effectiveness was verified. The results show that the skeleton PCM design can improve the output capacity of the device to a certain extent by realizing the TEG thermal management, and can effectively avoid the failure of the thermoelectric device by using its own heat storage capacity, the system performance of the skeleton PCM design is better than that of the conventional skeletonless PCM-TEG, the hot-side PCMTEG and double-sided PCM-TEG design can effectively maintain the stable operation of the TEG, and the cold-side heat transfer capacity of the TEG can make up for the lack of performance of the hot-side PCM-TEG system. The results of this study can provide a reference for the next application research of PCM-TEG.
