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Body Powered Batteries -- Thermoelectrics
An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this story on Yahoo, the folks at Applied Digital Solutions have "developed a miniaturized thermoelectric generator -- a half-inch diameter ceramic-based `battery' that converts low gradient body heat flow into electrical power." Right now they can power watches or small medical devices. How long before these things can power my handheld?"
It's the first step towards "The Matrix", I'm warning you!
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
How soon before this technology is co-opted and run into the ground by manufacturers of existing energy technology?
I hope it's not where I'm thinking, like how they used to take your temperature as a kid.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
powering a Beowulf cluster of anything?
" Dance, you silly little freak, dance!"
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Now your sexual escapades can create REAL electricity.
ha cha!
(I doubt this comments applies to any of us...)
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
Now, isn't this how the Matrix started? All these watches and Palm Pilots trying to take over the human bodies for more warmth, covering people at night like kittens on your bed? I can see it now:
Of course, I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
What happens when you take your wristwatch off for 8 to 10 hours? Sure, generating electricity from body heat is fine when its a pacemaker... take that off and you're likely going to miss it before the eight hour mark.
Nate
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
With all the friction from the fur, the Energizer bunny truly will keep going and going.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.
Woot w00t w007.
Anybody thought about The Matrix?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
they have had this kind of stuff for watches for a long time.
you will not be able to power your handheld unless it is somehow connected to your skin... and it probably still wont work unless you are soaked and holding a bare electrical cord.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Now you can pleasure yourself with no physical motion, nor any batteries to change!
Blar.
how long til I can have it powering my dildo 24/7?
I dunno about you, but I don't sleep with my watch on, nor do I wear one in the shower. Does it store energy very well? What about outside tempature fluctuation? How well does it handle in the winter? Does the amount of fat on your arm matter?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I assumed the release was just written by a clueless person when I saw "10 micron amps". Poor fool just meant "10 microamps".
Then later down I see a quote by the *chief scientist* saying that they plan to develop a battery "capable of generating 3 volts of electricity with 10 microns".
Maybe I'm just an idiot, but the only definition I know of "micron" is a unit of linear measure. I have no idea how this would relate to anything electrical. I'm still cautiously assuming they meant "microamps", but does anyone have any other ideas?
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
You have to wonder about the technical insight of the company, when their own press release (this IS a press release, not a news story, after all) when they report "1.5 volts of electricity with 10 micron amps". Is that a "microamp"? Next time, folks, let's get the spelling and grammar straight before you talk to the world.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
handheld?
Screw that. How long before they can power an
artificial heart!?
A completely self-contained, reliable, artifical
heart available off-the-shelf and requiring no
external battery pack or management would be a
sea change in modern medicine. Jean-Luc Picard
lives! Wonder what brand he uses?
Battery powered batteries huh? How's that for a breakthrough.
I didn't see an efficiency of the energy conversion listed in the article. I wonder how these compare to photovoltaics.
That's Mr. Eradicator to you.
trance-port
As always my memory fails me, but I read in Wired Magazine, about a year ago, about this guy that stored the energy generated by your footsteps and then used it to power all sorts of devices. It turns out he was doing pretty well, but I don't know what came out of it.
Now, if we were to identify a real demand for personal power generation, I'm sure there's a combination of strategies we could use, like those footsteps, body heat, chemicals, heck, even blinking!.. If you consider how many calories are burnt every day by our bodies in order to make it work, and how much energy is released in all sorts of ways, I'm sure we could power our cellphones and PDA's forever.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
small devices, with their own power which can be placed on/in any person and run off of them for an indefinite amount of time... tagged at birth, tracked in secret... never off the screen for even a nanosecond...
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
...for instance, pacemakers and artifical organs. The latest breed of artificial hearts has to be charged through the skin several times a week. With a few improvements to this new design, the mechanical heart could be TRULY self-contained. A very practical and useful application if you ask me...
This sounds like all those sci-fi terrorists.
"Don't shoot me. If my heart stops, this thing will explode."
On a more serious note, this thing would be great for my wife. She has had to have numerous pieces of equipment plastered to her to monitor her EKG. That stuff is heavy. I hope this gets into production soon.
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
Well, if someone writes that, email it to me.
Karma: Chameleon (Mostly affected by the 1980s)
This article at NY Times has an interesting article on other methods of using body energy to power things.
It mentions methods such as cranking and pumping, and of course, stride (i.e. stride-powered watches). One company created a human-powered electricity generator which creates electricity by hand pumping. If you pump one of these for a few minutes, it can power a cell phone for around 20 minutes.
void women (int money, time_t time);
a little thermodynamics shows this doesn't go a long way
And you thought falling into a frozen lake was a health hazard before... just wait until you have an artificial heart run by your body heat.
Even after the EMTs pull you from the lake they couldn't restart your heart for at least half an hour until your body temperature increased. Bad news.
Seriously, it doesn't mention what's the minimum temperature the device requires.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
How expensive is the material to create these small batteries? It's a ceramic, so would it be feasible to create bricks which could be used to line or even build smokestacks? Could this be a replacement for solar cells (the article indicates a temperature gradient as a power source, and those are everywhere). Obviously, these don't produce much energy, but ceramics are notoriously easy to mass produce and fashion into all sorts of artsy shapes.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Gee, I only need 33,333,333 of those advanced 3V, 10u-amp "batteries" to generate a kW. Put on the suit, hook it up to the microwave, and 20 minutes of dancing gives me dinner!
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
Wow.. remember The Matrix?? How all those robots were powered with the body heat of humans?
Oh man.. I hope we don't build an A.I. anytime soon.
Use poor people to solve California energy crisis!
Je t'aime Stéphanie
How long will it be before this technology can power a self contained artificial heart? If you can keep one of those running 24x7 on body heat, that'd be a huge step forward. The next step past that would be having the heart change its level of pumping based on how much you're exerting yourself and you could have a device that could feasibly be left in a human for the rest of his life AND have that span be 5-10 years or more.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
With the mention of wristwatches I'm reminded of a Seiko watch I saw advertised a few years ago that had some kind of internal mechanism for capturing kinetic motions (via ratchets?) into a windup spring that subsequently would provide sufficient electric power to run the wristwatch.
So I'm wondering how much electric power can be reasonably gotten from each source.
You'd have to set limits, so the thermoelectric generation doesn't consider an extreme case of someone naked sitting in artic temperatures full encased with thermo electric generators sucking off the terrific temperature gradient at their disposal. Likewise, a kinetic watch that weighs many kilograms and requires that it be shaken vigorously and constantly at 2 Hz in order to provide many watts is kind of a ridiculous proposition as well.
So what's next - hemoelectric generators powered by little turbines in major arteries?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I think some of the techs in my building could be our backup UPS if they designed these into s3x toys....
also, how would these things work for those of us who are cold blooded (son of two lawyers)?
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Gives it a whole new literal meaning...
IBM is already working on a magnetic form of RAM called MRAM which won't need a constant flow of electricity to store information. I'm not sure if or how it would be used in such PDA's but it's a possibility.
m ra m/
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/st/projects/magneto/
I can see it now:
The Boston Marathon becomes a Beowulf Cluster!
WWF wrestlers finally produce something worthwhile!
Japanese Corporate Sararymen power their buildings by energy generated during morning calesthenics!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Ummmm, I don't kill one person every eight miles. You cut travel time by 10 mnutes every hour by going 75. Worth it to me.
Hearing aids. Not quite as mission critical as a heart, but still good to use as a sort of field test, IMO.
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
Now all we have to do is pump up the voltage! Then cybernetically implant a cell phone in/on you, earbud installed into your skull, NO better yet, hardwired into your brain, microphone grafted to a tooth, and you are WIRED BABY!!
:)
Patch a PDA into it, figure out how to pipe the display to your retina, and we're Cyborgs! All wired, all the time.....
Now where does the antennae for 802.11 go? WAIT!! I know just the place!!
Bill
Isn't this like that movie Beowulf Cluster? I hope we don't design the Matrix anytime soon, that's just plain scarry!
Just stack one of these babies on top of a P4! That amount of heat'll generate enough electricity to solve California's power crunch!
</HUMOR>
Tags included for the humor impaired to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Any heat engine needs a place to sink the extra heat. The energy comes from the transfer of heat, in the direction that increases the entropy of the system. Otherwise it it propetual motion. delta T inside the body is low, maybe if they attached a large heatsink to your chest it could work. If I'm wrong, I'll just use one to power my Athlon :)
How long 'till someone can post a desccription of how these things work for us techies?
The article is basically the meaty paragraph of the press release repeated about 8 times.
They're small, like a fingernail, they put out 1.5 volts at 10Microamps.
They work on heat, continuously.
That's it.
Ok, I can understand how some avid lunatic collector could have many kinetic watches that he doesn't regularly wear.
What booggles the mind is the description of the automatic winder where it says each watch has a seperate motor. Is that for redundancy? So that if one motor fails, only one watch is wrong?!!
I guess they had to do something to justify the $4999 price tag.
Hey, if you're that into conserving energy, why not? You might even like it after a while.
Since everyone's brought up the matrix, it's obvious that the movie industry thought of this idea first and will be the appropriate content holders. Everyone will have to pay a tax to generate body heat and will no longer be allowed to share body heat without paying royalties.
-- this space for rent --
Admittedly this post is about passively generated electricity, but there's also been some work on electricity generated by harnessing activity such as walking. This company for example, has been using peizoelectric devices to generate a few milliwatts of power from walking/running activities. For the most part the energy produced is insufficient for anything other than trickle-charging batteries.
/. putting little piezoelectric generators under each key of the keyboard, and under those mouse buttons would beat those peizoelectric shoes anytime!
For most of us here on
"In mathematics, it's not enough to read the words -- you have to hear the music"
How long before these things can power my handheld?"
Pretty long: Handhelds are simply using more power than is theoretically available....
Roger.
Since this works off of body heat, this requires you to burn more calories! So now the overweight nerds out there can all have a GREAT excuse to (a) buy more gadgets and (b) not excercise!
"Aww, but I am exercising, I'm playing VirtualQuakeVII on my Palmiot! You have any idea how much processing juice that takes? I can feel myself getting thinner by the minute!"
If God gave us curiosity
a lot of people keep saying, 'oh no, if you have a self powered artificial heart and swim in freezing water near the polar cap, you're dead.'
ever notice how much more heat you generate whilst you sleep or excerise? just store the extra and use while you're 'swimming with polar bears', because i know just how popular it is to swim with polar bears.... sheesh.
>How long before these things can power my handheld?
Yes! They can provide 100's of watts!
These have been used for years to power deep-space satellites such as Pioneer 10 (solar power tends to not work too well when you get away from the sun). Plus, no moving parts to fail. They use radioactive decay as their heat source.
They use plutonium-238. It half-life is 87.8 years and emits primarily alpha particles, a non-penetrating type of radiation which requires little shielding.
Here's a good page from nasa and another from the doe
Power ranges from milliwatts in 1964, to "multi-hundred-watt" in 1977 (the sole power source for voyager), to 208 Watts electrical (+4500W thermal!) in 1990, to 507 Watts (electical) in 1997.
Practically, there's that whole radiation thing, plus some costs to enrich the material, and then also disappating the thermal energy released (it operates on a gradient, so you've got to have a cold end to counter the hot end)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Doesn't this remind anyone of the fremin suits from Dune? I know they were not electric, but they used heat and motion to purify the waist water from the body.
It would be more efficient to just use mechanical (kinetic) energy and heat to power the devices than to convert it into electricity, but it is unlikely.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
All of this has amusing similarities to the wonderful 6th grade science experiment of making a potato powered clock. You know - just shove the wires into a standard red russett and watch with amazement as the clock goes. Same principle, really, save that potatos are lumpy, brown, relatively sedentary items that seem to be more agreeable when fried, and people are... oh, wierd.
This would make for the perfect permanent implantable tracking device...I'll let that simmer in your pots for a while.
"Witty Phrase."
Perhaps someone that is better versed in thermodynamics can answer this:
Wouldn't these things be cold to the touch all the time since they are, in essense, based on an endothermic reaction?
user@host:/usr/bin$ whatis
java: nothing appropriate.
A new kids toy B.I.O Bugs was first advertised on the premier of the new Star Trek series. These BEAM robot toys seek out IR signals to 'feed' on, but there are other such experimental robots that convert sugar to electricity. Consider a toy of this sort with thermolytic batteries where it seeks out body heat to 'feed' on. I can see it now. "Jonny, don't let that bug shove his antena up your..." Oh, damn!
OK, this technology has potential but it could also make for some really creepy toys.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Or until someone plugged in an external power supply. Which you would probably have in any case, just in case your primary system failed.
Can someone please tell me how this clueless post got moderated to 4???
I see a double requirement here folks which can make such a tech. not much usable.
In order for those devices to function they need body energy. The way to get body energy is to "exercise". In order for us to keep exercising, we must "eat".
Now tell me, is an already over-weighted, under-exercised society, are really willing to appreciate such a device, when it will constantly remind them to "wake-up and move" when it is low on battery? I think not!
We are a society looking for comfort, those "body-energy-devices" won't appreciate such an attitude.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
From: Homeslice How 'bout, how 'bout, fart-powered batteries?!
If it is using energy from my body, does it cut into the length of my life? Nothing is free, man.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Ever since i actually tried using laptops on my lap for any reasonable period of time I decided that they really should run cold, using my body heat for power...
<soccer mom voice> You don't have a fever, Timmy. You're just a little thermo-electrically abundant right now. </soccer mom voice>
But seriously, will Tylenol® makers Johnson & Johnson now be at odds with the energy companies? I wonder how long before Informed Experts appear on TV commercials to let us know that a fever is a good thing, or the D.E.A. shows up at raves to pass out free thermoelectric generators with handfuls of PMA...
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
I am sure they used Nuke energy too. Using humans in large numbers was just to improve the plot and run the toilets.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Take it off and it lasts about a week before running out of juice.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
You guys ran an article on this awhile back.. I can't find the link but it was about a year ago.
That's a few watts... you'd need something to convert BioGasses into energy...
... and a lot of beans...
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I, someone GMing a matrix based game, can find it very easy to swallow. You don't need even greater investment, you need a bit of biotech to recycle. Offcourse you would be losing energy each generation, and ofcourse the energy efficiency would be low (compared to, say, just burning dried humans) but that is OK. If human beings are required for something else too (such as their cognitive ability), it sounds plausible. Otherwise why not use mice or whales instead, which would not require whole matrix stuff and won't hack. Notice that morpheus clearly states his explanation about history is based on little they know, they don't really know what had happened and sometimes he openly "guesses." The real problem with matrix is time. Simulation time is either too slow, or it is reset after a few years or matrix is not isochornic ("different parts experience different time intervals" in case I mistyped it.) None of the explanations are consistent with the rest of the film.
Thus, it would be meaningfull to talk about any of these or any products (e.g., area x thickness --> volume, voltage x amps --> watts, etc.) and micron amps would be some sort of effectiveness metric (backed, presumably, by some assumptions about body temp, room temp, etc). If this interpretation is correct, for device rated at x-and-so micron amps, total power would be proportional to total area.
On the other hand, it might just be a typo.
-- MarkusQ
Why not just eat lots of beans, drink lots of milk, eat lots of raw garlic and wash it all down with lots of beer? The resulting gas would probably power an over overclocked Athlon, assuming you wanted to carry one around.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
We could have clothes that generated power integrating these things into them. Then we could plug in various devices into a plug in our clothes, like handhelds, watches, cellphones.
But wait, is the price that these things will be selling at be feasable? Why not make panels out of these things, put them across a black panel surface and use them as solar panels that take in the heat from the sun and produce energy, but will it produce more than solar panels? will it be cheaper?
ideas = thoughts = mind = thinking = knowledge, control of one = control of the others
Question everything.
i seem to remember a similar technology involving a can o beans and a bic lighter.
"Is he dead?"
"Yes, see, his watch stopped."
--
Please email me in reference to your detailed missive on Microtest's legacy. Together we can get to the bottom of this and see Open Source prevail. nfwriter@yahoo.com
Shockwave Version here, and Non-Shockwave version here.
Another post in this thread correctly states that the energy is stored electrically in a capacitor, not a spring.
I had a summary of the concept all set to submit, but like an idiot I tested my url with the same browser session I was submitting with, and lost it! No time to re-type it. The links tell all.
My kid in the Navy brought a fake one home last winter, and I'm going to take it apart to see how close the knock off is to the real one :)
db
Cig:
ôô
When doing general guesses about how much cooling
one might need for a room, a rule of thumb is to
assume the average human is about a 150 watt
lightbulb. So there's plenty of energy there to
harness.
So I was thinking... Looking at all the cool knee
braces they've cooked up for folks who are in
rehab or need the support... What about a very
much lighter one with some kind of embedded
dynamo?
By the way, Seiko's been building electronic
watches that store up the body's kinetic energy
for a while.
And I am wearing a primitive version of all this -
a Seiko self-winding watch.
Dave
what about the eskimos...eskimoes...people in alaska?
-- When you're downloading off of eDonkey and IRC you're downloading communism...remember that --
Peltier thermocouples also work inverse. Instead of using electricity to pump heat, you can also put an ice cube on it and get about 3V out of it. How is this different?
Well, first, this is a publicly traded company with a market cap of $30 million and a trading price of 22 cents (up 5 cents from yesterday). And as far as I can tell, the GPS wristwatch is purely vaporware right now. I think they are just trying to get publicity.
Think of it. Provided they can be built cheaply, if this thing could do anything close to what they say it can do, we could litter the ground with these things and collect free electricity from heat.
Jason.
I guess if we assume a skin temperature of 34 celsius (307 K), and an ambient temperature of 20 C (293 K), then our efficiency is bounded by about 4.5%. Given that we dissipate on average 64W/m^2 at idle, and a "fingernail" sized device (1.5 cm^2), we should have about 0.001 W available to us, or 0.4 mW assuming 100% of Carnot cycle efficiency. At 1.5V, this gives a maximum current output of 0.27 mA. Since they are getting about 10 microA, then we can assume they see an efficiency of about 4% themselves. So, it seems like there's room to grow!
Maybe they'll be able to power those PDA's after all!
There's a quick discussion here with regards to human-body-power available for wearable computing.
Also, there's another company that builds thermo-ionic power generating chips (cleverly named PowerChips) called Borealis. They see them being used as a second-stage on typical gas turbine/etc.. generators. They claim to see 20% efficiency wrt the Carnot cycle limit, a few orders of magnitude better than most thermo-electric (Peltier based) generators.
BTW: All these calculations are very "back of the envelope"!
The only things that I'd add into the whole mess:
1. Didn't Morpheus mention something about "a certain form of fusion"? I'm assuming something biological is required for that to work. (Hey, it's called science fiction for a reason.
2. Without sunlight, we can assume that most of the life on Earth got zapped (humans always watching out for themselves). From there it would have been pretty logical to go from "destroy humans" to "capture/harness for fusion system/keep trapped in system". (Maybe the Matrix requires some sort of neural net to run - aka, the machines *need human brains to keep their own programs running*, which makes them even more dependant on us as we are on machines (which lets Morpheus's comment on the irony of humans using tools make sense).
You'd have to assume that by the future, other sources of power (nuclear, oil, etc) are also depleted (which may have launched the whole humans vs AI war to begin with - maybe they didn't *want* to have the energy star label on their monitors...)
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I wonder how hot they can get. I'd rather strap them all over my car's exhaust pipe and get rid of the alternator.
And how about geothermal? Maybe they don't scale up...
where do they stick it?
This "story on yahoo" (a press release, really) makes be just a little bit suspicious indeed.
;-)
I admit that Thermodynamics weren't my favorite, plus they are long behind, but the repeating use of "microns" instead of "microamperes" plus the fact that this company stops just short of selling kitchen sinks... Well, call me paranoid
Would that be my first troll?
-- Fast, Cheap, Well. Pick two.
An article that is very similar to this one, yet a lot more informative is at TacoInspector.com.
No gradient (or too small). Or do these things have external parts? (Darn!)
Anyway, you need a gradient. Cold and wet weather is best.
If anyone is thinking to make the most expensive coat in the world: you have to lose a lot of heat to run the little heater. Well at least it's not as bad as the sunpowered pocketlight.
Is it just me, or is every one wondering exactly where are we supposed to stick these batteries to power our palm pilots?
isnt this the same type of tech that'll be used in the matrix???
I admit that the idea sounds good, but with my luck they'd give me one to power my pacemaker.
Then I'd forget and go ice fishing or skiing and have a brown out or worse!
Nope. I'll stick with the bunny batteries for now.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Ooooooooooooooo. Nice accessible site. The pinnae are used by the body as radiators (that's why they stick out into the airflow) so you'd be copying a tested design. This idea has potential.
"Will do sex for Quake3". Make the spouses and porn site happy too.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Wow, just think what this could mean for the personal vibrator industry!
I see computers with artificial intelligence, humans put in boxes like their where in a farm. Whats that? It seems that they have cables connected to their body. Noooo... their comin to get us to fuel the Matrix's campaign of domination in the "real" world.
But wait!!! I see a hero, a hacker, he looks kinda Keanu Reeves. And theres some mysterious rebels too...
2 reptiles beneath your current threshold.
ok, so you get a bunch of cows, or pigs or horses or something and just have walk on conveyor belts.
hook'em up, and just keep feeding them.
Anyone remember the Oxymoron battery ad from 'Sheep in the Big City'? The batteries last as long as you do!
You really should be asking how much you can power with you handheld!
Thank you, thank you. Godnight Everybody!
Can't help but think of the Human Battery stuff from the Matrix. We better watch out for those Aibo pet-things from Sony. It's just a matter of time...
thermonucleonic power cell breast implants
Someone else hinted at this, but if they are made out of ceramics, a readily available and easy to make material, why not make them HUGE to generate electric from the Earth's heat? Make the walls of buildings out of this stuff to generate power for that building?
As long as one keeps a core body temp, imagine:
:)
Replacing a diseased heart with a turbine
Creating an internal dialysis system
Recreating almost any organ's function
Putting an internal immune-enhancement that monitors the bloodstream and zaps anything foreign, even cancer cells. Early detection begins at the 4-50 cell rance instead of the 1000 cell range now considered "early".
Now for the super-powers
A built-in "tazer". Two electrodes in the tips of your intex fingers. Touch someone and ZAP! down they go.
A video record/playback system for espionage. Go on the tour. Pass the body-search. Look at everything and record in clear, digital format for later review.
A built in electromagnet system wired to your feet and grafted to your bones. Stick to any metal surface. Astronauts suddenly have gravity in a microgravity environment. Wire the palms too and climb up walls.
Fun stuff, it's gonna take one mother of a battery to do it all. And the recharge will take a while.
Out
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
This is one of those technologies that could have great potential both in the biomedical field and in the portable device field. Unfortunately, the article doesn't give much detail - and has a couple of strangely glaring errors (10 microns?)
From what I remember of RTGs (Radio Thermal Generators - like those used on Deep Space probes) rely on a temperature differential to generate power. With a body powered unit, you'd be looking at drawing power from the difference between human body temperatute and the ambient temperature outside.
If it's 98 degrees outside, hope you have -real- batteries around to provide power.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
I got my digital planner, laptop, wireless transmitter, and cell phone watch all plugged into my thermbattery. Now, someone turn up the damn heat its freezing in here.
Now how many BTU's of body heat does a person generate again, Morpheus?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
What if we made a full body suit of these things? Lets see..
.01 sq inches per disc = 100 microamps per sq inch
10 micro amps per disc /
average human body 2600 sq inches * 100 microamps per sq inch = 0.26 amps per person
It's interesting to note that 0.26 amps is about triple what it takes to kill a person.
0.26 amps at 1.5 volts = 0.39 watts, or 0.0005 horse power
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
How long before these things can power my handheld?"
You'd have to have one mother of a fever...
If these help you lose weight by reducing body temperature and increasing metabolism they would sell like hotcakes.
I will be glad to host your power needs. I'm a large male with virtually no body hair. Order now for prime power locations:
Rolls on Back of Neck: $0.25/hr
Underarms: $0.50/hr
Between Butt Cheeks: $5.00/hr
Back Side of Balls: Call for latest price.
is that the machines are trying to alter their environment to increase their available "food", not that different from humans
Ceramics is likely just the closest familiar idea. The overwhelming majority of the good bulk thermoelectrics (and all of the nanostructured ones I'm aware of) are made of semiconductors. Not Si or GaAs, but more exotic ones like bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3), bismuth antimony (Bi-Sb, an alloy), &c. In general they come from the bottom right f the periodic table and are pretty toxic and expensive to make -- about equivalent to the CdTe in solar cells.
That said, there are already thermoelectric devices being used to reclaim waste heat in power plants. Also, the NASA Voyager space probes use thermoelectric devices coupled to a radioactive Pu source to generate their juice - mostly because thermoelectrics are pretty reliable devices.
More applications are in cooling -- using the opposite physical effect for localized cooling, especially for applications where vibration or noise are problematic. Laser diodes and some other IC devices use thermoelectrics for cooling (or at least temperature regulation). Larger applications, like household refrigeration, aren't practical (despite the environmental benefits) because the efficiency is ~10%, compared to 30% or so for your fridge and ~90% for the enormous air conditioners in office buildings.
Current research is largely driven by electronics folks -- wouldn't it be nice to get rid of those noisy, bulky fans in your computer?- and is focusing on, of course, nanotechnology as the answer for improving the thermoelectric figure of merit.
--Janell
Is it really obvious this is the subject of my (ongoing) chemistry PhD work?
The only time the small, attached or inserted, medical devices would fail is when the body is cold...
could a patient have both a bio-battery and an old fashioned one at the same time? and use the bio one first, but in failure turn to the other?
what kind of shitty computer do you have? I didn't know they still made them with fans
While I think it would be cool to have a body-powered GPS system, I'm not so sure I like the idea of the device they have lined up to use the 'battery' reporting my whereabouts, pulse rate, mental state and the identity of the girl I'm with to her parents!
Oh well. I guess I'll have to start dating my pets.
You are all fartheads.
your backyard has more blackheads than a compton barbeque
Anyway, this is from the folks that make the Digital Angel. This newest press release is a way to power those little babies until something in them breaks. Look ma, no batteries!
They're wonderful little devices. Full of medical, security, and law enforcement possibilities. Lifesaving, Terrifying little devices.
Welcome to the future. May the gods have mercy on your soul.
To email, do the obvious.
I dunno. Those Borealis people sound like a scam. They claim a new type of electric motor, a new type of solar cell, a new thermoelectric cooler, and a really big magnetite deposit ready to be mined. And somehow none of these things is actually in production.
Folks, I am surprised none of you has mentioned this. How many of you have relatives with pacemakers? How are they powered/charged? How often do they need to be recharged/replaced? A device that can power the pacemaker from naturally generated power will solve those problems.
Those of you without pacemakers, imagine yourself with an underskin battery box or charging loop. How about some NiMH regargables in your guts?
Haven't Seiko watches been generating power by heat gradients for years?
As for how long the watch lasts without wearing it, i currently have a kinetic Seiko watch that lasts for 14 days without wearing it (i've tried it a couple of times).
Newer models last for up to 4 years without any movement by stopping the hands. I don't see why the temperature gradient watches would be any different.
The greatest amount of electric power you can get to a heat source is calculable. Consider this: at rest, a human puts out about 80W as heat, and this is at 37 degrees C. The greatest possible efficiency for a heat engine is Carnot efficiency,
e = 1 - L/H
In this case the value is
e = 1 - (273+20)/(273+37) = 0.055 = 5.5%
(Room temperature assumed to be 20C)
Multiplying this efficiency by the power wasted at rest, we get only 4.4W. Considering that this assumes you process every watt put off by your body, a small fraction of that is all you can expect.
So don't expect too much power from these sorts of things. You'll never run a Pentium off this.
Keep in mind this isn't free energy. Don't be suprised if your waist constantly feels cold when you wear one of these devices. Or maybe you might find yourself eating a little more...
Hmmmm, converting heat to power. Would there be a way to hook these puppies up to saw a laptop heatsink? Capture some of that excess, wasted heat to power the cooling fan or something. Granted yes, the fan takes a puny amount of power compared to everything else, but every little bit helps, right? Just think, if you had enough of them you could power up your hard drives from the heat off your monitor.
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
Actually, a female friend of mine had something similar without power requirements at all - just get a clit piercing and you're set to go. Get off just by walking down the street. After a while you get used to it, so you just take it out for a couple days (apparently it doesn't close as easily as other piercings) and you're ready to go again.
Cool thing was I always had an audience when I practiced on my bass. She had a habit of sitting on my amp...
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Remember the physics classes where you would stick one end of a probe into liquid nitrogen and the other at room temperature and you would register the voltage difference and manually calculate the temperature. You know - a thermocouple.
I wondered when somebody would be able to make thermocouples generate usable energy. Looks like this is what ADSX is doing.