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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?"
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?
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seiko has a bunch of kinetic watches that go into a low power mode when they stop moving. The hands freeze, but time is still kept. when it realizes that it is being moved again, it puts the hands in the correct place and continues on it's way. I believe the latest ones will keep time for up to a year without movement.
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.
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Bob
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>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)
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It's always bothered me, in "The Matrix," the way that they harvest humans as batteries. If the AI was all that intelligent, they would have known that the energy investment in farming humans would be greater than the output. YES, the human body does output X joules of energy, but in order to output that energy in a harvestable form an even greater amount of energy has to be invested. Without the sun's energy all of life on earth would die, farming like that would not be practical.
thermoelectric batteries are totally new...
Link to the Citizen Eco-Drive Thermo watch...
"Eco-Drive Thermo converts the temperature difference between the user's body and the surrounding air into electrical energy to power the movement. [...] The original Eco-Drive Thermo was launched to great acclaim at the 1999 Basel Show."
Don't know if it's shipping to consumers yet, but the technology's been around for a while.
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.
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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...)
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