Using Your Body Heat To Produce Electricity

German scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits have developed a way of harnessing natural body heat to generate electricity.

Using the principle of thermoelectric generators (TEG), made from semiconductor elements, the TEGs extract electrical energy simply from the temperature difference between a hot and a cold environment. Normally, a difference of several tens of degrees would be required in order to generate enough power, but the differences between the body’s surface temperature and that of its environment are only a few degrees. “Only low voltages can be produced from differences like these,” explains Peter Spies, manager of this sub-project at the IIS. A conventional TEG delivers roughly 200 millivolts, but electronic devices require at least one or two volts. The engineers have come up with a solution to this problem by creating a circuit that can operate on 200 millivolts.

Circuits that are “excited” at 50 millivolts already exist. Peter Spies believes that in future, when further improvements have been made to the switching systems, a temperature difference of only 0.5 degrees will be sufficient to generate electricity.

Source: “Electricity from body heat” Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Research News 8-2007-Topic 1

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