The biggest hassle with smartphones and smartwatches is that they need to be charged every day. However, as warm-blooded animals, we constantly generate heat, and that heat is converted into electricity that can be used to power some of the electronic devices we carry around with us.
Flexible thermoelectric devices (F-TED) can convert thermal energy into electricity. The problem was that F-TED wasn’t actually flexible enough to be comfortable to wear, or efficient enough to even power a smartwatch. It was also very expensive to make.
But now a team of Australian researchers believes they have finally achieved a breakthrough that could put F-TED back into orbit.
Zhi-Gang Chen, a professor at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, said: “The power generated by the flexible thermoelectric film we developed is not enough to charge a smartphone, but it can be used to charge a smartwatch. That should be enough to keep it running.” Does that mean we’re at the point where we can create a thermoelectric Apple Watch band that can keep the watch charged? “It’s going to take some industrial engineering and optimization, but… We can definitely realize such a smart watch band,” Chen said.
Manufacturing heaven
Thermoelectric generators, which generate enough power to power things like the Apple Watch, have traditionally been made from hard bulk materials. The obvious problem for them was that no one wears metal plates on their wrists or runs power cables to their watches from elsewhere. On the other hand, flexible thermoelectric devices were fully wearable while offering efficiency suitable for low power. health monitoring electronics It’s not power-hungry hardware like a smartwatch.
Back in 2021, producing 35 microwatts per square centimeter in a wristband worn during a normal walk outdoors was enough of a shock to get a research paper published in Nature. Today, Chen and his colleagues have created a flexible thermoelectric device that performs more than 34 times better at room temperature. “As far as we know, we hold the current record in this field,” Chen says.
