DARPA To Turn Humans Into Batteries

DARPA is working on a project that will convert energy from the human body to power a variety of military gadgets. From the article: "Obviously, our bodies generate heat — thermal energy. They also produce vibrations when we move — kinetic energy. Both forms of energy can be converted into electricity. Anantha Chandrakasan, an MIT electrical engineering professor, who is working on the problem with a former student named Yogesh Ramadass, says the challenge is to harvest adequate amounts of power from the body and then efficiently direct it to the device that needs it." If I remember the movie correctly, this didn't turn out so well for the humans.

Comments

Simple

[0racle]

the challenge is to harvest adequate amounts of power from the body and then efficiently direct it to the device that needs it

You combine it with a form of fusionm duh.

average human is 75-watt light bulb

[peter303]

Auditorium A/C designers know that - about one watt per kilogram resting, triple that when aerobic. Many portable electronics devices can run off a few percent of that energy. It would be nice to capture that energy mechanically, thermally, or chemically.

Re:average human is 75-watt light bulb

[Actually, I do RTFA]

It was obvious that you were calculating the average. However, you were correcting someone who was pointing out that human beings are a 75 watt lightbulb, and in the comment clearly added the condition "at rest". And a 225 watt lightbulb during aerobic.

You can use those two numbers to come up with a guesstimate of activity level as a function of GI tract efficency (assuming a boolean activity level), which would be nifty.

Re:Matrix Jokes ...

[MonsterTrimble]

Have you tried watching Matrix: Dezionized? It's a fan edit with most of the Zion stuff edited out and the 2nd and 3rd movies combined. Pretty awesome.

Re:How many KiloCalories if you burn a human?

[tpwch]

Its a pretty easy calculation. According to google an average non-overweight human is about 15% fat and 18% protein (the protein number varies a bit depending on the source, but lets use 18% for this calculation).

A gram of fat is 9 kcal and a gram of protein is 4 kcal for a person. Not sure if there is anything else in the human body that would store energy, the carbohydate amount is small enough that its neglegible.

So a person weighing 75 kilos would have 155 250 kcal in his body. I imagine that when burning that however a lot of the energy would be lost to evaporating the water in the human body.