via HACKADAY: Power for Nothing and Your Kicks for Free

We all know that you can convert heat into electricity. Usually, you do that with some form of steam, but there are other methods, too, including thermocouples. If you’ve ever seen something producing waste heat, you’ll appreciate Penn State’s work to harvest power from hot pipes. The idea is simple in theory: create a flexible thermoelectric generator that can wrap around hot pipes or other surfaces to gather otherwise lost heat. The full (paywalled) paper is also available.

The devices can produce up to 150% more power per unit area compared to other thermoelectric generators. A three-square-inch test device produced over 50 watts. Scale that up to an industrial pipe hundreds of feet long, and you could create some serious power. To accomplish this, the scientists used strips of six thermocouples and connected them for a total of 72 thermocouples. Liquid metal between layers improved the device’s performance.

This isn’t a totally new idea. Russia was famous for making radios in the 1950s that operated using a generator that went around the flue of a kerosene lamp. Since the Russians were pulling this off in the 1950s, converting heat into electricity is obviously nothing new. Of course, your body creates heat, too, so why not use that?