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Still Suits and Body-powered Devices
Helmholtz writes: "Soon
body powered devices may be a reality thanks to work being done at the Center for Space Power and Advanced Electronics, a NASA commercial center in Alabama. The article talks mostly about military and space applications, but I think it'd be really slick to make still suits, not to mention portable audio players, PDA, and even laptops that are powered by energy that we are generating anyway."
Hmmm. Somehow I won't be beta-testing the reverse-engineered water...
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
I have a Seiko kinetic on my wrist that tells me reality goes faster than Slashdot (and tells me the time too).
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
While these cool ideas are unfortunately under-researched (according to the article), it is pretty obvious that the energy efficiency of the items you wish to power is a more important research goal than how you power them, as greater efficiency will always have a benefit, while improved energy reclamation techniques may be limited in usefulness.
IMHO, it is better to have efficient core business operations than a business/revenue model whose excessive burn rate losses are "balanced" by millions pop-up X10 video cam ads. The former model has greater inherent stability and therefore flexibility. While the latter is just plain annoying.
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
Oh, yes.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
http://chronocentric.com/watches/winders.shtml
All the irony involved there makes me think I should just go with a battery in the first place. =)
Look at that hot chick over there ... overloaded and burnt out my Visor. Damn!
Here's one I didn't notice in the article. How about sucking chemical energy from blood chemicals? Basically we're talking about a dialysis-like blood filter that pulls out stuff like glucose and fatty acids and does its own cellular respiration.
Good for controlling your weight ... diabetes ... arteriosclerosis ... but bad for maintaining high energy and preventing chronic fatigue ... hmmm, maybe it isn't such a good idea. (:
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Seiko has the only Quartz watch of this kind, afaik.
However, self winding watches have been around for quite a while. Now, these watches don't run off body heat, sweat, brain waves or any else NASA might be thinking of, god knows. They work from adjustments in tilt, giving off enough power to build a reserve. Just getting out of the office chair and going for coffee, or off the couch and walking the dog, should be enough.
"I think it'd be really slick to make still suits..."
That's right! Forget about flying cars, I wish for the day when I can drink tepid water harvested from my own sweat and urine!
324006
They claim that 81W are waiting to be harvested from a sleeping human. This is incorrect, due to Carnot's law (a thermodynamic law). Basically if we have a heat source at Th (the body) and a heat sink at Tl (the environment) the maximum possible efficiency is
1- Tl/Th
All temperatures must be in Kelvin (or Rankine). So for a human at 37C = 310K, with an environment at room temperature 20C = 293K, the best efficiency is
1 - 293/310 = 5.5%
If they can get 3% efficiency with current materials, they're already doing extremely well. At this efficiency a sleeping human, putting of 81W of heat, can only provide
81W * 5.5% = 4.4W
of usable energy. It's true that 4.4W can power a fair bit of energy-efficient technology, but they're starting with a lot less available energy than they claimed in the article.
I fail to see why this doesn't sound like a royal pain in the end.
-- MarkusQ
Did anyone else think that it was ironic that the article starts out by callin the human body an "inefficient, energy-wasting machine"?
The energy we waste is orders of magnitude below any machine that humans have built; if we were to create a machine that did half of what the human body did with current technology, I guarantee you that it would lose a helluva lot more in heat than we do.
Besides which, the heat that we generate makes possible our ability to keep chemical reactions going that are WORTH the heat expenditure. Sure, it may be wasteful to eat a thousand calorie meal to power us for six hours, but show me an mp3 player that can power itself off something so readily available as plant material or a loaf of bread before starting to argue that our ability to convert energy from diverse sources results in a wasteful process. In other words, I'd rather be able to be omnivorous and waste a lot of that energy than to need to be powered off electricity that can only come from sources like burned fossil fuel (and we waste a HUGE amount of energy when we harness that power).
If you ask me, the human body is remarkably EFFICIENT, because of the elements it can use for power, and because the wasted energy that is derived from those elements is minimal in comparison to the waste from, say, and Athlon processor.
What they're ACTUALLY doing in this article is trying to harness the efficiency of the human body, not its inefficiency. It's easier to feel a soldier an extra couple of peanuts a day and let them power all their devices than it is to try to use lousy, lossy batteries to do the same work.