I remember a conversation I had some time ago with Aggie Beau and Lovely Daughter. Aggie Beau uses his smart phone constantly. I asked how often he charges it up, and he said at least four times a day. what if he’s not conveniently around an outlet? His phone could run out of charge! OH, Say it isn’t so! (dramatic back of hand on forehead pose) Technology strikes again – with a solution.
Carroll, a physicist and head of Wake Forest University’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials, was discussing this problem last year with his 10-year-old daughter, Lauren, when she came up with a suggestion: What if Carroll could design something that harnessed the heat from someone’s hand, or from the phone itself, to give a cell-phone battery more power? Carroll agreed that would be pretty cool.
Last month, Carroll’s lab unveiled a fabric that does just that. Called Power Felt, it generates electricity from heat. Wrap your cell phone in Power Felt, and it feeds off your body heat to recharge while it’s in your pocket.
The uses could be legion:
Carroll is a lifelong Southerner, and he’s acutely aware of how powerful summer heat can be. He says Power Felt installed just under the roof of a house could be used to power household appliances. Lay it on the floor of a car and it could use the heat generated from sitting in a midday parking lot to run air conditioning and the radio. In an electric or a hybrid car, the Power Felt might even boost mileage.
Of course, it’s nanotubes again.
The challenge for his team, says Carroll, was to create something that was electrically conductive – the way metal is – and thermally insulating – the way cloth can be. The solution was to imprint carbon nanotubes onto a woven mat of plastic fibers.
Since it takes relatively few carbon nanotubes to give the fabric thermoelectric properties, the cost is reasonable. Carroll estimates that, at a large scale, Power Felt could be fabricated for as little as a dollar for a swatch big enough to cover a cell phone.
Needless to say, the Pentagon, along with a slew of investors, are interested in his invention.
I hope he makes a buttload of money off of it. Good for him. But he needs to share it with his daughter, since she was his inspiration. And I’ll bet she brought him grilled cheese sammiches while he was working, too.