High-Power-Density Wearable Thermoelectric Generators for Human Body Heat Harvesting

Abstract

Wearable thermoelectrics has attracted significant interest in recent years. Among them, rigid-structure thermoelectric generators (TEGs) were seldomly employed for wearable applications, although those exhibit significant advantages of high device output performance and impact resistance. Here, we report a type of rigid wearable TEGs (w-TEGs) without ceramic substrates made using a simple cutting-and-bonding method. Owing to the small contact area, the w-TEGs comprising 48-n/p-pairs can be well attached to the human body. The lack of ceramic substrates leaves more space in the height direction, which benefits the wearability in practical applications and high power density. We demonstrated that increasing the height of w-TEGs from 1.38 to 3.14 mm significantly improves the power density by a factor of 10. As a result, the maximum power densities of 7.9 μW cm^-2 and 43.6 μW cm^-2 for the w-TEGs were realized under the breezeless condition and a wind speed for normal walking, respectively. This work provides a feasible design solution for rigid-structure free-substrate w-TEGs with very high power density, which will speed up the research of wearable thermoelectrics.