Amay J. Bandodkar et al. Soft, stretchable, high power density electronic skin-based biofuel cells for scavenging energy from human sweat, Energy Environ. Sci. (2017). DOI: 10.1039/C7EE00865A
A team at the University of California has developed a skin patch that uses human sweat as a fuel source to power an external device. Scientists and engineers are convinced that consumers want easy-to-wear consumer products—health monitors that are built into clothes, for example, or that adhere to the skin. In this new effort, they have found a way to harness human sweat as an energy source and report that the device they built was able to power a Bluetooth transmitter.
Sweat can be used as an energy source because it contains lactate, which produces energy when it oxidizes with lactate oxidase. They applied the enzyme to their anode, which was made using porous carbon nanotube-naphthoquinone structures. The team created electrodes using what they describe as “gold islands,” which were joined using stretchable material connected to polymer bases. The cathode was made using porous carbon nanotube-silver oxide structures. The result was a tiny patch just a few centimeters wide, but which was able to generate enough power to run a small Bluetooth device (and an LED) when worn by a person running on a treadmill. It produced 0.5 V of power with a density of ~1.2 mW cm–2 at 0.2 V. Because sweat was continually produced, the device needed no batteries.
The researchers believe their device could prove useful as a means for powering health monitoring devices such as new kinds of glucose monitoring machines that measure the amount of glucose in sweat. It could also be used to measure other substances in sweat—lactate levels, for example, can give an indication of how well muscles are working. It could also be used to power a Bluetooth device that sends health information to an external source for analysis. https://techxplore.com/news/2017-06-skin-based-biofuel-cell-scavenging-energy.html
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