The Green Lean Amine Machine: Harvesting Electric Power While Capturing Carbon Dioxide from Breath

As wearable technologies redefine the way people exchange information, receive entertainment, and monitor health, the development of sustainable power sources that capture energy from the user's everyday activities garners increasing interest. Electric fishes, such as the electric eel and the torpedo ray, provide inspiration for such a power source with their ability to generate massive discharges of electricity solely from the metabolic processes within their bodies. Inspired by their example, the device presented in this work harnesses electric power from ion gradients established by capturing the carbon dioxide (CO₂ ) from human breath. Upon localized exposure to CO₂ , this novel adaptation of reverse electrodialysis chemically generates ion gradients from a single initial solution uniformly distributed throughout the device instead of requiring the active circulation of two different external solutions. A thorough analysis of the relationship between electrical output and the concentration of carbon capture agent (monoethanolamine, MEA), the amount of CO₂ captured, and the device geometry informs device design. The prototype device presented here harvests enough energy from a breath-generated ion gradient to power small electronic devices, such as a light-emitting diode (LED).