Investigation on the Effects of Heat Sink on the Performance of Thermoelectric Generator for Human Body Heat Harvesting

In recent years, thermoelectric power generation from waste heat has been considered as a promising alternative green and clean energy. In this study, the effects of different heat sink types (flat and checkerboard pattern) on the power output of thermoelectric generator (TEG) in harvesting human body heat are investigated. Several sets of experiments are conducted on three different body part locations, namely forehead, forearm, and wrist of different individuals of different genders by considering parameters such as surrounding temperature, skin temperature, output voltage and current. The values of power generated from the TEG are calculated and analysed. The findings show that the addition of copper heat sink to the basic TEG had generally increased the average power output across the board for all body parts and modes of activities. While the addition of heat sinks on the TEG increases the power output.Additionally, the checkerboard heat sinks have larger impact to the performance of TEG with an additional power incremental of 23.8% as compared to flat heat sinks (183.8% incremental) due to the larger surface area for faster heat dissipation.