Thermoelectric generation technology, due to its several kinds of merits, especially its promising applications to waste heat recovery, is becoming a noticeable research direction. Based on basic principles of thermoelectric generation technology and finite time thermodynamics, thermoelectric generator system model has been established. In order to investigate viability and further performance of the thermoelectric generator for waste heat recovery in industry area, a low-temperature waste heat thermoelectric generator setup has been constructed. Through the comparison of results between theoretic analysis and experiment, reasonability of this system model has been verified. Testing results and discussion show the promising potential of using thermoelectric generator for low-temperature waste heat recovery, especially in industrial fields. Several suggestions for system performance improvement have been proposed through the analysis on this system model, which guide optimization and modification of this experimental setup. By integrating theoretic analysis and experiment, it is found that besides increasing waste heat temperature and TE modules in series, expanding heat sink surface area in a proper range and enhancing cold-side heat transfer capacity in a proper range can also be employed to enhance performance of this setup. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.