Integration of Flexible Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting System for Self-Powered Sensor Applications
Linlong Liang, Pan Sheng, Guang Yao, Zhenlong Huang, Yuan Lin, Binbin Jiang
Abstract
Flexible thermoelectric generators (FTEGs) can continuously harvest energy from the environment or the human body to supply wearable electronic devices, which should be a clean energy solution and provide an opportunity to satisfy the increasing power consumption of multimodal sensing and data transmission in wearable electronic devices. Here, the 64-pair FTEG was fabricated by introducing the plated through-hole and heterotypic electrode structures to optimize the thermal transport, showing the largely improved output power of 4.1 mW and record-high power density of 312 μW cm –2 at a given ambient temperature of 15 °C inside a measurement equipment. And a high power density of 79.8 μW cm –2 was also obtained in a FTEG worn on the wrist during working at a relative high atmosphere temperature of 16.5 °C. In addition, an intelligent real-time healthcare system is designed to continuously track various physiological parameters and transmit the processed data to a smart terminal, whose power consumption was around 0.1 mW can be solely supplied by body heat even at the static state of the human body. Overall, this work provides a viable method to increase the power density of FTEG and a global optimization scheme for wearable electronics.