Human body parts heat energy harvesting using thermoelectric module

Abstract

Energy harvesting has become of a growing interest recently due to its potential to be utilized in wide area of self powered systems. The concept of energy harvesting is to capture unused ambient energy and convert into usable electrical energy which is stored and used for performing sensing or actuation. The latest advancement is focusing on energy scavenging system to power small and autonomous electronic devices. The main advantages of energy harvesting concept lie on the portability, clean, reduce dependency on battery power and it also offers long-term solutions. This research focuses on the human heat energy harvesting which converts human waste heat to electricity. This paper focuses on extracting heat energy from five parts of human body heat such as human palm, top palm, wrist, top wrist and leg. Thermoelectric module is utilized to convert the human body heat to electricity. A booster circuit is developed to boost the weak voltage to higher voltage in order to power up an LED as output indicator. Based on experimental results, the maximum output voltage from thermoelectric module obtained is from the human palm part, which is 0.1 V. It is able to be boosted up to 2.9 V at the voltage booster output. The output voltage generated at load is 2.47 V and the power output is 24.7 mW.