Your body is an excellent source of energy. A walking, sustainable battery, you might even say.
While that sounds like a plot point from "The Matrix," scientists have been trying to figure out how to efficiently harness the human body as an energy source for a long time. That development would be especially useful for small electronic devices like wearables that don't require a great deal of power.
Now researchers in Australia have figured out a way to make that a potential reality.
A new study from the Queensland Institute of Technology shows how they did it. Professor Wenyi Chen, lead author of the study, explained the breakthrough in a news release: "Flexible thermoelectric devices can be worn comfortably on the skin where they effectively turn the temperature difference between the human body and surrounding air into electricity."
This possibility has been understood for years, but designing and developing a material that can efficiently and comfortably — and comfort is probably the most important factor — convert body heat to electricity has been difficult. Potential solutions are generally expensive, too.
At least it was. Chen's research has the capability to change all of that.
The technology relies on something called solvothermal synthesis. Basically, that describes a process that produces nanocrystals in a high-pressure, high-temperature solvent. The nanocrystals are then printed onto a thin, flexible, wearable film, with the nanocrystals acting as an amplifier for the electricity produced by body heat.
The film is cheap to produce because it's easily scalable, according to Chen. "We created a printable A4-sized film with record-high thermoelectric performance, exceptional flexibility, scalability and low cost, making it one of the best flexible thermoelectrics available," he said.
The possibilities for such a technology are seemingly endless.
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Totally 👍 Any situation where there's a temperature difference between something warm and something cool can power this film. Think of your smartphone generating its own power, and you not having to worry about finding a charging cable. Or, perhaps on a hot day, you wear a small electric cooling device powered by the heat difference between your body and the surrounding air.
If this tech truly is scalable, it could mean a drastic reduction in the amount of materials like lithium needed to be mined for the production of batteries for things like phones and watches. Mining is a massively energy-intensive industry and generally an environmentally ruinous process, so energy creation without the need for so many batteries is huge.
The potential is, therefore, incredible. And who knew we could be our own sustainable energy sources?
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