Integration of Flexible Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting System for Self-Powered Sensor Applications

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.