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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!
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); }
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.
Now you can pleasure yourself with no physical motion, nor any batteries to change!
Blar.
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
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?
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 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);
thermoelectric batteries are totally new...
You're talking about kineto-electric batteries - the ones that charge when you shake them or otherwise move them about.
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!
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."
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
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
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.
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"
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
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.
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.
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
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
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?"
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.
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
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.
"Is he dead?"
"Yes, see, his watch stopped."
--
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
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
These devices work off the MOVING of heat from place to place, not absorbing the heat (that would be a violation of thermodynamics - you have to reject some heat to the cold side of a device).
Actually, if you want to do this, just buy a Peltier module (or buy a Coleman electric cooler and rip the module out of it). Make one side hot, and one side cold, and it will make electricity.
Some people have said, "Put this on top of your Atlon|Pentium and you can make electricity." True, but a bad idea - the module will act as a thermal resistance, preventing maximum heat from your CPU. Result - one cooked chip.
The amount of electricity generated by these things is pathetic - you'd be better off buying a World Radio, ripping the crank generator out of it, and using that to power your toys.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Wow, just think what this could mean for the personal vibrator industry!
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.
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.
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?
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.