Organic Thermoelectric Textiles for Harvesting Thermal Energy and Powering Electronics

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable method to produce organic thermoelectric textiles (TETs) using knitting techniques, demonstrating their high power output and potential for powering wearable electronics in healthcare and environmental monitoring.

Contribution

The study introduces a large-scale knitting fabrication process for organic TETs and combines analysis and experiments to optimize their structure for better power generation.

Findings

High output power density of 51.5 mW/m2 achieved

Demonstrated continuous powering of wearable electronics

Fabric structure significantly influences power generation

Abstract

Wearable thermoelectric devices show promises to generate electricity in a ubiquitous, unintermittent and noiseless way for on-body applications. Three-dimensional thermoelectric textiles (TETs) outperform other types in smart textiles owing to their out-of-plane thermoelectric generation and good structural conformability with fabrics. Yet, there has been lack of efficient strategies in scalable manufacture of TETs for sustainably powering electronics. Here, we fabricate organic spacer fabric shaped TETs by knitting carbon nanotube yarn based segmented thermoelectric yarn in large scale. Combing finite element analysis with experimental evaluation, we elucidate that the fabric structure significantly influences the power generation. The optimally designed TET with good wearability and stability shows high output power density of 51.5 mW/m2 and high specific power of 173.3 uW/(g.K) at delta T= 47.5 K. The promising on-body applications of the TET in directly and continuously powering electronics for healthcare and environmental monitoring is fully demonstrated. This work will broaden the research vision and provide new routines for developing high-performance and large-scale TETs toward practical applications.