Design and Fabrication of a Thermoelectric Generator Based on BiTe Legs to power Wearable Device

Abstract

To attain power generation with body heat, the thermal resistance matched design of the thermoelectric generator was the principal factor which was not critical in the case of thermoelectric generator for the waste heat generation. The dimension of thermoelectric legs and the number of thermoelectric leg-pairs dependent output power performances of the thermoelectric generator on the human wrist condition was simulated using 1-dimensional approximated heat flow equations with the temperature dependent material coefficients of the constituent materials and the dimension of the substrate. With the optimum thermoelectric generator design, thermoelectric generator modules were fabricated by using newly developed fabrication processes, which is mass production possible. The electrical properties and the output power characteristics of the fabricated thermoelectric modules were characterized by using a home-made test set-up. The output voltage of the designed thermoelectric generator were a few tens of millivolts and its output power was several hundreds of microwatts under the conditions at the human wrist. The measured output voltage and power of the fabricated thermoelectric generator were slightly lower than those of the designed thermoelectric generator due to several reasons.