Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Still Suits and Body-powered Devices

Posted by michael on from the stay-out-of-the-rain dept.

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."

8 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. |energy harvesting" and urine(!) by Compact+Dick · · Score: 4, Funny
    Someone needs a new PR exec :-) But from the site [watch out for the pop-unders]:

    Urine-based fuel cell: Yes, you can turn pee into power...

    ...one attractive feature of this fuel cell concept is the production of water as a by-product of the system.


    Hmmm. Somehow I won't be beta-testing the reverse-engineered water...
    --
    Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
  2. That's not new by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Insightful
    "Soon body powered devices may be a reality"

    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
  3. Re:Hmmm. by deglr6328 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh, yes.

    --
    - "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
  4. When no human is present... by nsample · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The ultimate irony is that "human powered devices" are often at a complete loss when there's no human present to power them. Some uber-entrepeneurs have actually come up with devices that provide power to human-powered devices that don't have their humans attached.


    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. =)

  5. I can see it now ... by (void*) · · Score: 5, Funny

    Look at that hot chick over there ... overloaded and burnt out my Visor. Damn!

  6. It's already here, well, kinda. by mlafranc · · Score: 4, Informative
    Seiko has been selling it's Kenetic line for a few years, even coming up with the Auto-Relay line, supposidly keeping time for up to four years.

    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.

  7. I'm so excited! by BillyGoatThree · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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
  8. Not that much energy from heat by Roger_Wilco · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.