Power Electronics with your Body Heat
Harvesting power from the human body successfully will be a significant milestone. When we successfully manage this we will be able to cut out many forms of batteries from our lives. Innovations in wearable tech will follow quickly after!
How does it Work?
The main way to harvest energy from humans is by creating power from our movements. Small generators could produce electricity from friction or bending of our limbs. Other systems use the heat from our body to create small amounts of power.
Mehmet Ozturk, NC State Univerity
New Innovations Paving the Way Forward
Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a device that has the potential to be the best of its kind. The flexible thermoelectric generator not only is capable of producing electricity from body heat, but it is also able to self heal.
The device can be used for many application because it is extremely flexible. This is a break through as devices to date have been more rigid, which has been challenging to incorporate effectively into wearable tech.
They started out by using the same materials that are used in more solid devices so that manufacturing would be simplified. The use of liquid metal to connect the thermoelectric elements, increased the power generated while also making the device self-healing because the liquid metal can reconnect if a connection is broken.
The Future
The researchers plan on continuing to improve the efficiency of the energy harvester. They see a future with wearable medical devices and air quality monitors all being powered by our bodies!
Go North Cacklacky!
I posted on this a few days ago as part of my thoughts on the future of ioT.
Flexible Thermoelectric Energy Harvester to Charge Your ioT Wearables
Great minds are thinking alike! We should have more people on here keeping us all up to date on environmental progressions! Especially in todays climate!!
It doesn't seem like people here are actually interested in technology, at least beyond cryptocurrency.
Here's my post for tomorrow 'Economic and Environmental Cost of Mining Crypto Currencies'. I read some very disturbing facts recently about how much energy is consumed by all the rigs undertaking pointless calculations! One prediction that I can remember is that is was predicted BitCoin could consume as much electricity as Denmark by 2020. Scary!
I follow a guy who posted a multi-part series on how he had solar, wind and manpower to create the electricity in order to run the mining rigs he had. At this point, if you don't have free energy to mine, you are already at a disadvantage.
I will have to try and find him! I have been reading about how the Chinese are trying to be efficient with rigs and how they are pouring money in to go for economies of scale.
Here he is
https://steemit.com/@tzcap
Thank you. I will have a scan. Sounds very interesting.
The bigger picture is that this could be adapted to be used on roads,cars,houses,places,ships, just about anything in warm areas. Flags,ocean currents, river and lake currents for the movement part of it.