You can now thank discovery of a new kind of material that will allow a small piece of jewelry or any other adornment to generate enough power that can power a cooking pane or a body sensor or even a smartphone within a few hours. A team of researchers from Utah have been working on this project for quite some time under a materials science and engineering professor called Ashutosh Tiwari. The team found that a cost-effective bio-friendly material could be formed when a combination of calcium, terbium, and cobalt was used. It could easily produce power through thermoelectric process.
The final results of this discovery were recently published in a paper whose first author is a postdoctoral researcher in material science and engineering from University of Utah, Shrikant Saini. Whenever one end of the material is very cold while the other one is pretty hot charge carrying particles from hotter end move to the colder end producing an electrical voltage. This new material require less than a degree’s difference to produce considerable amount of voltage.
For years and years, researchers were searching for the right kind of material that could increase efficiency of the procedure and generate more power while still being non-toxic. There are several other materials as well that can produce power in this manner like mercury, telluride, or cadmium based materials, but most of these are toxic to human beings. What gives this new material produced by Tiwari’s team an unmatched advantage is that it can generate bio and eco-friendly products while maintaining its edge in efficiency in terms of power generation.
This new material has scores of potential applications, it can be used in formation of jewelry that takes in body heat to empower implanted medical devices like heart rate monitors or blood-glucose monitors. Saini adds, “In power plants, about 60 percent of energy is wasted, with this, you could reuse some of that 60 percent.”
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