| Baby Yr So Hot You Could Power a Small Wireless Transmitter |
| Written by Hank Green | ||
| Tuesday, 21 August 2007 | ||
 We've covered thermoelectric conversion before. Basically, it's when a device produces electricity when one part is hotter than another part. Obviously, this could be a fairly useful trick in capturing waste heat. It would be even more awesome if they could be used to harvest the heat of our bodies, and use it to power our gadgets. Unfortunately, up until now, thermoelectric devices weren't able to be used with such slight temperature gradients. Well not anymore. The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has managed to create energy with extremely small temperature differentials. The result, Palpatinesque power from the palm of your hands? Not quite, really, just about 200 millivolts...or roughly 100 times less energy than it takes to power your cell phone. But that's the palm of the hand. Which got me thinking about areas of the body where the temperature differentials might be greater. The neck...the wrist...the...ahem...and now I am going to stop this list before anything disturbing happens. Via Engadget and Discovery See Also: -Generating Electricity from Heat- -Pulling Energy from Thin Air- -Generating Power with Hotness (actually a solar bikini...sorry)-
Comments
(2)
Sounds familiar...
written by Matt , August 22, 2007
Are you one of those sentient machines from The Matrix? Because I seem to recall them doing the exact same thing to harvest humans as batteries, so that's why I ask.
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written by zupakomputer , November 09, 2007
The future of wearables: powerplant underpants.
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