Scholars seek to recycle wasted energy to produce electricity by integrating thermoelectric generators (TEGs) with internal combustion engines (ICE), which rely on the electrical conductivity, b,of the thermal conductor strips. The TEG legs are alloyed from iron, aluminum and copper in a strip shape with specific characteristics that guarantee maximum thermo-electric transformation, which has fluctuated between a uniform, Gaussian, and exponential distribution according to the structure of the alloy. The ICE exhaust and intake gates were chosen as the TEG sides. The digital simulator twin model checks the integration efficiency through two sequential stages, beginning with recording the causes of thermal conductivity failure via filming and extracting their data by neural network procedures in the feed of the second stage, which reveal that the cracks are a major obstacle in reducing the TEG-generated power. Therefore, the interest of the second stage is predicting the cracks’ positions, Pi,j, and their intensity, QP, based on the ant colony algorithm which recruits imaging data (STTF-NN-ACO) to install the thermal conductors far away from the cracks’ positions. The proposed metaheuristic (STTF-NN-ACO) verification shows superiority in the prediction over [Mat-ACO] by 8.2% and boosts the TEGs’ efficiency by 32.21%. Moreover, increasing the total generated power by 12.15% and working hours of TEG by 20.39%, reflects reduced fuel consumption by up to 19.63%.