Gelled Electrolyte Thermoelectrochemistry: An Investigation Into Waste Human Body Heat Harvesting

The question:
Can human body heat energy be harvested and scaled up to possibly generate large quantities of green energy sustainably?

The method / outline:
To investigate gelled electrolyte thermoelectrochemistry, firstly, optimising the gels for best performance for our needs, and then investigating new redox pairs for heat energy harvesting around the temperature difference between the human body and the environment (around 20 degrees). This will allow us to generate electricity from the range at which human body heat is different to the temperature of the outside environment using the seebeck effect (Se = dV/dT). This effect has been known for a long time in thermoelectrics, but due to expensive and rare metals has been only used in select applications, whereas the possibility of using redox pairs to harvest this difference in temperature could potentially generate orders of magnitude more volts per kelvin than thermoelectrics. This idea has been looked at non-extensively already in liquid and ionic liquid media, but gelled electrolytes have scarcely been examined as yet and some of the literature has many problems, so this investigation undertaken is of importance and value to green energy harvesting if done properly. As using redox pairs to generate electricity is a relatively new area of green energy generation, our plan is to use iron-based redox pairs as iron is an earth-abundant metal. We have the potential using this 4 year Ph.D. to make a meaningful contribution to this field.