15 Year Old Designs a Human Powered Flashlight and Wins Google's Science Fair
A 15 year old has placed 1st in Google's Science Fair for creating a human heat powered flashlight.
Scientiest have been harvesting the heat emitted by humans as a source of renewable energy for years now. However "the latest development in thermoelectric energy generation doesn’t come from a high-tech lab at MIT; it comes from Ann Makosinski, a 15-year-old Canadian girl who developed a flashlight that is powered by the heat from a human hand."
Check out her clear and direct project description:
"My objective in my project was to create a flashlight that runs solely on the heat of the human hand. Using four Peltier tiles and the temperature difference between the palm of the hand and ambient air, I designed a flashlight that provides bright light without batteries or moving parts. My design is ergonomic, thermodynamically efficient, and only needs a five degree temperature difference to work and produce up to 5.4 mW at 5 foot candles of brightness." (source: Google Science Fair)
With her design, she not onlyprovides quick and reliable access to a light source, but created this product with the aim of reducing the number of single-use batteries that are thrown in landfills. In addition to reducing battery usage, she has considered that her product can be developed cheaply and deployed to populations that can’t afford electricity to light their homes. I believe that's what we like to call: Saving the Planet!
Congrats to Ann Makosinski for helping to save the world, one game-changing product at a time!
