
What if we could harvest energy from human heat, sweat, or vibrations?
STORY BY Knowable
In “I Sing the Body Electric,” poet Walt Whitman waxed lyrically about the “action and power” of “beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh.” More than 150 years later, MIT materials scientist and engineer Canan Dagdeviren and her colleagues are giving new meaning to Whitman’s poem with a device that can generate electricity from the way it distorts in response to the beating of the heart.
Electronics are now so powerful that a smartphone has more computing power than all of NASA did when it put the first men on the moon in 1969. The extraordinary advances technology has made over time have raised hopes that devices worn on, or even implanted within, the body can also become ever more capable.
A key drawback of most wearable and implantable devices still remains their batteries, whose limited capacities restrict their long-term use. The last thing you want to do when, say, a pacemaker runs out of power is to open up a patient just for a battery replacement. The solution to this problem may rest inside the human body — rich as it is in energy, in its chemical, thermal and mechanical forms. This has led scientists to investigate a plethora of ways for devices to harvest energy from the bodies that host them, detailed by Dagdeviren and her colleagues in the 2017 Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering.
The bellows-like motions that a person makes while breathing, for example, can generate 0.83 watts of power; the heat from a person’s body, up to 4.8 watts; and the motions of a person’s arms, up to 60 watts. That’s not nothing when you consider that a pacemaker needs just 50 millionths of a watt of power, a hearing aid needs a thousandth of a watt, a smartphone requires merely one watt.
Now Dagdeviren and others are designing machines that use the human body itself as their source of energy. Increasingly, researchers are testing such wearable or implantable devices in animal models and people.
Good vibrations
One energy-harvesting strategy involves converting energy from vibrations, pressure and other mechanical stresses to electrical energy. This approach, producing what is known as piezoelectricity, is often used in loudspeakers and microphones.
A commonly used piezoelectric material is lead zirconate titanate, whose lead content raises concerns that it might prove too toxic for use with humans. “But for lead to decompose from the structures, they would have to be heated to temperatures higher than 700°C,” Dagdeviren says. “You’ll never reach such temperatures in the body.”
To take advantage of piezoelectricity, Dagdeviren and her colleagues have developed flat devices that can be stuck onto organs and muscles such as the heart, lungs and diaphragm. These devices are “mechanically invisible” in that their mechanical properties are similar to whatever they are laminated onto, so they don’t hinder those tissues when they move.
So far, such devices have been tested in cows, sheep and pigs, all animals with hearts roughly the same size as those of people. “When these devices mechanically distort, they create positive and negative charges, voltage and current — and you can collect this energy to recharge batteries,” Dagdeviren explains. “You can use them to run biomedical devices like cardiac pacemakers instead of changing them every six or seven years when their batteries are depleted.”
Scientists are also developing wearable piezoelectric energy harvesters that can be worn on joints such as the knee or elbow, or in shoes, trousers or underwear. That way, a person can generate electricity for electronics whenever they walk or bend their arms.
When designing piezoelectric gadgets, one might — counterintuitively — not want the materials that are best at generating electricity. Instead of choosing a material that converts 5 percent of all mechanical energy it receives into electricity, for example, you might want a material with only 2 percent or less efficiency. If it converts more, “it might do so by placing more of a load on the body, and you don’t want it to make you tired,” Dagdeviren says.
Body heat
A different energy-harvesting approach uses thermoelectric materials to convert body heat to electricity. “Your heart beats more than 40 million times a year,” Dagdeviren notes. All that energy is dissipated as heat in the body — it’s a rich potential source to capture for other uses.
Thermoelectric generators do face some key challenges. They rely on temperature differences, but people usually keep a fairly constant temperature throughout their bodies, so any temperature differences found within are generally not dramatic enough to generate large amounts of electricity. But this is not a problem if the devices are exposed to relatively cool air in addition to the body’s continuous warmth…
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