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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.
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Why is mankind so obsessed with harvesting energy from the rarest sources in the universe? Why not start with the most abundant sources?
Hope is the currency of fools
I'm a D Cell battery!
My work here is dung.
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.
Al Gore or AI Gore?
Dammit, I need serifs!!! At least we don't have to worry about A1 Gore.
If you want (a) power; (b) biometric identification; (c) biological status/health monitoring, consider the Rectal Thermocouple... This will normally generate substantial additional power in combat as an added benefit. :-)
OK, so humans become mobile power sources.
I really don't want to see a guy on the side of the road with wires shoved up his arse trying to jump his car to start because his battery is dead.
*clench* "Try it now!"
That said, I guess the BDSM scene can now do something useful after attaching the alligator clamps to their nipples.
Dura-cell is PEOPLE! (said in best Charlton Heston voice)
Maybe they won't have to carry all of the extra batteries, which will help.
Seriously*, you've hit a significant advantage. The normal 'basic load' of batteries is 30 days, from what I remember, and carrying those batteries around, particularly in Ranger/light infantry/Special Ops units is a tremendous drag. Whatever technique gets used, though, has to account for the fact that light infantry soldiers spend a lot of time being still (because what moves can be seen, and what can be seen will be shot...), so either you need some technique to store the power or you need something that can generate some amount of power when the soldier is not moving.
* for humor on this topic, see my other post ;-)
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.
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