Thermoelectric energy harvesting for mobile phone charging application

To address the dramatic increase in energy consumption of personal electronic devices, human body heat is harvested using a thermoelectric generator (TEG). This paper presents harvesting the heat energy also known as thermoelectric energy from human body heat which would be wasted otherwise using a TEG to charge a mobile phone battery. Based on the temperature difference between the heat generated from the heat source and the environment, the TEG is able to convert heat energy to thermoelectric energy. Heat energy is a renewable source that is easily accessible. In this paper body heat is being harvested. A step up DC-DC converter is used to step up the harvested voltage. This voltage can be either stored or used to power up low-power electronics. In this work, a typical Universal Serial Bus (USB) hand phone was charged using the harvested heat energy.