Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
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);
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!
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
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.
>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.
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
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