Flexible gel can turn body heat into power for next-generation wearables
A soft material developed by researchers at QUT can convert body heat into electricity, opening the door to self-powered wearable devices and more sustainable energy technologies.
Published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, the research found that the flexible hydrogel captured wasted heat and turned it into usable electrical power with record efficiency.
Team leader Professor Zhi-Gang Chen said the discovery could help power future wearable electronics without relying as heavily on conventional batteries.
“With this gel, we demonstrated how we can turn heat that would otherwise be wasted, such as body heat, into a practical power source,” Professor Chen said.
“Remarkably, a small 10mm square device can generate around 0.46 volts. Although that is a small example, it demonstrates strong potential for real-world applications.”
The study was led by QUT researchers Chenyang Zhang, Dr XiaoLei Shi, Wenyi Chen and Dr Qian Liu together with Professor Zhi-Gang Chen from the QUT School of Chemistry and Physics and the ARC Research Hub in Zero-emission Power Generation for Carbon Neutrality. Former PhD students Tianyi Cao, Boxuan Hu and Shuai Sun were also involved with the project.
Professor Chen said the innovation worked by controlling how charged particles moved through a soft polymer network, allowing the material to efficiently generate electricity from small temperature differences, such as the heat naturally produced by the human body.
Unlike traditional thermoelectric materials, which are often rigid, expensive and difficult to scale, the new hydrogel is soft, flexible, low-cost and suitable for scalable manufacturing, while also delivering excellent performance at room temperature.
The development could enable a new generation of technologies, including battery-free health monitors, smart fabrics and e-textiles, self-powered sensors and Internet of Things devices, and systems that recover wasted heat for useful energy.
This new study adds to a series of significant research publications in the past few years by the team led by Professor Chen, focussing on the problem of the enormous amounts of energy lost globally as waste heat.
“From powering wearables to reducing emissions, new technologies like this have the potential to transform how energy is captured and used in everyday life,” Professor Chen said.
Read the full study, Ionic Coordination and Hierarchical Architecture Enable Record nType Thermoelectric Efficiency in Soft Hydrogels, published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, online.
Main photo (left to right): Dr Qian Liu, Professor Zhi-gang Chen, Mr Wenyi Chen and Dr XiaoLei Shi.
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Rod Chester
QUT Media
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