Body Heat Could Charge Your Cellphone

An anonymous reader writes to mention Nature is reporting that scientists have discovered a much more efficient way to use silicon to convert heat into electricity. This offers the possibility of many different applications including possibly charging your portable electronics just by wearing them close to your skin. "The concept of converting waste heat into electricity isn't exactly new, but it never really materialized due to efficiency hurdles. Now, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley think they may have found a key [to] increase the conversion efficiency by a factor of 100."

Comments

So...

[Icarus1919]

Between the cell phones being charged by shaking them, by solar power, and by body heat - at what point will they be blowing up in our pockets?

Downsides

[Tablizer]

Slap Slap Slap - But m'aam, I just wanted to charge my cellphone and your breasts were handy.

Re:Downsides

[Joebert]

This will sound funny, but, that's perfectly natural.

I'm sure plenty of people here have at one point thought that way about your mom.

Re:Downsides

[taiwanjohn]

Hehe... "Hey baby, if I said you had a hot body, would you hold it against my phone?" ;-)

Why just cellphones?

[ivan1011001]

Think bigger. Put these and some batteries near your brakes or under the hood of your car. Line the Shuttle with them, attach them to the boosters that get jettisoned. Tape them to politicians so all the hot air charges them.

I want to see the users manual

[Brett Buck]

I just hope the word "insert" doesn't appear in the instructions.

        Brett

Needs a temperature gradient

[the_other_chewey]

Note that this of course does also need a temperature gradient to work. This is no magic electricity creating cooling device.

Re:Needs a temperature gradient

[rmauger]

Right, I'm not a scientist, but TFA talks about all sorts of fantastic things (e.g. charging your iPod with body heat) that aren't mentioned in the Abstract of the cited piece in Nature. While the article does quote one of the authors for such claims, what the Nature article Abstract (I'm not paying $ to read stuff online) alludes to is improving the efficiency of potential co-generation from sources of waste heat from combustion--power plants, car engines, etc. Besides, if it's cold enough out that I'm wearing a winter coat, do I really want to shove a heat sucking iPod down my pants? Not really. But sticking it against my car's engine? Sure.

Also TFA mentions "...the discovery will depend on whether these rough nanowires will be efficient enough to make commercial sense." So yeah, I don't see it (soon) being any more energy efficient to manufacture heat converting nanowires for my iPod Nano than it would be to say, construct a battery. But maybe they have something that could better convert a massive heat gradient into electrical energy cheaper for the purposes of co-generation. Who knows, maybe even cut down on heat pollution.

Basic physics: no.

[goodmanj]

Paging Dr. Carnot, Dr. Nicolas Carnot, call for you on line 2...

Human body thermal output is about 120 watts on average, skin surface area is 2 m^2, so a 50-cm^2 cell phone body can intercept 0.6 watts of body heat. BUT, the laws of thermodynamics place a limit on how much of that heat can be converted into useful work to charge the batteries in the phone. That limit depends on the temperature of the heat source and sink.

Suppose one side of the phone is in contact with your skin at 32 C (305 Kelvin), and the other side is in contact with room-temperature air at 27 C (300 K). (In practice, the temperature difference will be smaller, because the air near your body will be warmed above room temp.) The maximum efficiency one could get from these thermodynamic efficiency is (305-300)/300 = 1.7%.

And that's the theoretical maximum possible conversion efficiency. Real systems rarely come close to that.

SO, the most energy we could possibly get out of this generation system is 0.6 * 1.7% = 10 milliwatts. My iPhone's battery holds about 2400 mW-hours of juice, so if I installed this charging system and held it against my skin 24/7, it would take about 10 days to charge in the theoretical best case... and in practice, much longer than that.

This idea's dead in the water at the basic physics stage, before we even get to the engineering considerations.

Re:Basic physics: no.

[Ewasx]

You did not read the article, did you? Of course you didn't, this is slashdot!
The article is talking about using the technology in the clothes and using the energy from that to power a cellphone. This would give you a lot more surface. And I don't know where you live, but "room temperature" here is not so tropical. So the theoretical maximum according to your calculation would be more like ((305-295)/295) * 120 = about 4 watts. Not a lot, but my telephone charger can provide about 2.2 watts and my battery is charged within 2 hours with that...

Re:Basic physics: no.

[Anonymous Coward]

the most energy we could possibly get out of this generation system is 0.6 * 1.7% = 10 milliwatts ... but combined with a form of fusion, the devices will have all the energy they would ever need.

Oh wait!

The inverse makes silent sub air-conditioning

[MichaelCrawford]

My dad was an engineer for a Naval submarine shipyard. He told me that thermoelectric panels attached to the inside of the hull cooled the submarine silently when a voltage was applied.

Hope that wasn't classified or anything - but then Dad passed away a while back.

Re:The inverse makes silent sub air-conditioning

[jc42]

The effect has been known for a century... don't need to worry about classification!

Actually, at least here in the US, you probably should still worry about it being classified information.

For example, various historians have mentioned that the Rosenbergs were executed for giving "secrets" to the Russians that apparently were available in a number of college-level physics textbooks at the time.

Decades later (but still a few decades before today), I did an end-of-chapter exercise in a physics text that was something like: Using equations E and F from this chapter, and table T in appendix A, calculate the critical masses of the following isotopes .... There was an asterisk at the end, and the footnote said that telling any of the answers to a non-citizen was a felony under US law and listing the possible penalties (which included execution).

The US government's security agencies don't consider previous publication in school textbooks to be a restriction on their right to classify information.

For another example, google for RSA encryption. I have one of those t-shirts that has the 4-line perl implementation of RSA, and on the back "Warning: This t-shirt is a munition" plus a reference to the appropriate regulation. I never had the nerve to wear it to the airport on an international flight, though I did wear it to a number of techie meeting where there were non-citizens. I kept wishing someone would get arrested for wearing one, since the trial could have been entertaining. But I suppose now they wouldn't bother with a trial; you'd just disappear to an undisclosed location in an unstated country for a few years and then dropped off on a hillside in Macedonia when they're done with you.

reversible?

[TheSHAD0W]

Is this effect reversible? Could it be turned into a super-efficient Peltier module?

Personal Thermonuclear Generators

[sgartner]

How about using these in a water-heater sized device in your home. With a isotope heat source at the bottom, a coil lined with these strings, filled with some kind of heat transferring liquid (say, water). You could put one of these in every home and without any moving parts (as in a traditional thermonuclear generator with giant turbines) it would be very reliable.

Re:Personal Thermonuclear Generators

[jc42]

How about using these in a water-heater sized device in your home.

I've seen this suggestion any number of times, often with snide comments about how engineers have missed something obvious. This usually causes some engineer to simply mention that there's a better way. No matter how your water heater is powered, it's always more efficient to add insulation to the water heater, and use the fuel that you save to directly power an electrical generator. This skips the stage of extracting power from the water heater's heat loss, and can thus extract more electricity from the fuel (or use less fuel to generate the same electricity).

Unfortunately for such schemes, it's only practical to extract energy from a heat gradient if the heat gradient is going to be there anyway. Then, if the extra weight isn't a problem, you might be able to use some of the heat you're losing to produce a small amount of electricity "for free" (i.e., at no additional fuel cost).

Copper Top

[Layth]

"[Scientists] may have found a key increase the conversion efficiency by a factor of 100." Let me guess, this is involves some form of fusion.. and the machines have found all the energy they will ever need. This happened in a dream once, that I was so sure was real..