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Wearable devices powered by body heat? (pictures)

A wearable thermoelectric generator printed on a glass fabric gives us the ability to harvest the body's heat for power.

James Martin
James Martin is the Managing Editor of Photography at CNET. His photos capture technology's impact on society - from the widening wealth gap in San Francisco, to the European refugee crisis and Rwanda's efforts to improve health care. From the technology pioneers of Google and Facebook, photographing Apple's Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sundar Pichai, to the most groundbreaking launches at Apple and NASA, his is a dream job for any documentary photography and journalist with a love for technology. Exhibited widely, syndicated and reprinted thousands of times over the years, James follows the people and places behind the technology changing our world, bringing their stories and ideas to life.
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1 of 7 Prof. Byung Jin Cho/KAIST

Thermoelectric generator on glass fabric

Researchers from the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) are set to revolutionize wearable technology. They've developed a new light and flexible generator made out of thermoelectric materials printed on glass fabric.

The design makes human-powered devices possible in a way we've never seen before. Yielding a tool that's smaller and lighter than other biogenerators, this method may be the power-harvesting boost wearables need to compete.

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2 of 7 Prof. Byung Jin Cho/KAIST

A light, flexible glass fabric

How to supply power in a stable and reliable manner is one of the most critical issues when it comes to commercializing wearable devices, says Byung Jin Cho, a professor of electrical engineering who developed the flexible generator.

The team of KAIST researchers, headed by Cho, devised a solution to this problem by developing a glass-fabric-based thermoelectric generator that's light, flexible, and produces electricity from the heat of the human body.

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3 of 7 Prof. Byung Jin Cho/KAIST

A revolutionary design approach

Professor Cho and his team synthesized liquidlike pastes of n-type (Bi2Te3) and p-type (Sb2Te3) thermoelectric materials and printed them onto a glass fabric using a screen printing technique.

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4 of 7 Prof. Byung Jin Cho/KAIST

Reduce weight, generate power

"For our case, the glass fabric itself serves as the upper and lower substrates of a [thermoelectric] generator, keeping the inorganic [thermoelectric] materials in between," said Cho.

"This is quite a revolutionary [way] to design a generator," Cho continued. "In so doing, we were able to significantly reduce the weight of our generator, which is an essential element for wearable electronics."

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5 of 7 Prof. Byung Jin Cho/KAIST

The critical hurdle for wearables

For electronics to be widely adopted they must be light, flexible, and equipped with a power source, which could be a portable, long-lasting battery or no battery at all but a generator.

How to supply power in a stable and reliable manner is seen by many manufacturers as one of the most critical hurdles to successfully commercializing wearable devices.

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6 of 7 Prof. Byung Jin Cho/KAIST

Abundant thermal energy

The KAIST glass-fabric-based flexible thermoelectric generator uses a screen printing technique and the self-sustaining structure of a thermoelectric device without top and bottom substrates. With this technique it's possible to make the device both thin (approximately 500um), lightweight (0.13 g cm−2), and flexible, opening it up for a wide array of applications. Cho said scaled-up uses might include automobiles, factories, aircraft, and vessels where we see abundant thermal energy that's currently being wasted.

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7 of 7 Prof. Byung Jin Cho/KAIST

Multiple tens of times more electricity

hough both smaller and lighter in its design,  the glass-fabric generator also produces large output power density that greatly outperform other fabricated pliant thermoelectric dynamos -- yielding multiple-tens of times more electricity than previously developed bio-generating instruments.

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