Volume 10, Issue 10 2200528
Research Article

Thermoelectric Clothing for Body Heat Harvesting and Personal Cooling: Design and Fabrication of a Textile-Integrated Flexible and Vertical Device

Hend M. Elmoughni

Corresponding Author

Hend M. Elmoughni

Faculty of Textile Technologies and Design, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, 34437 Turkey

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Ozgur Atalay

Ozgur Atalay

Faculty of Textile Technologies and Design, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, 34437 Turkey

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Kadir Ozlem

Kadir Ozlem

Computer Engineering Department, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, 34437 Turkey

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Akanksha K. Menon

Corresponding Author

Akanksha K. Menon

George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332 USA

Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720 USA

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First published: 24 August 2022
Citations: 1

Abstract

Textiles offer the ideal platform to develop thermoelectric (TE) clothing for body heat harvesting and personal thermoregulation. Herein, textiles used in everyday clothing are adapted to fabricate a flexible and vertical TE device architecture. Selective laser patterning is used to create cavities for embedding bulk inorganic Bi2Te3 legs into a knitted polyester fabric used in next-to-skin sportswear. The device thermal design is optimized using fabric layering to accommodate longer legs up to 0.8 mm, and a flexible 3D-printed heat sink is integrated to maximize heat dissipation to the ambient. Using flexible copper foil to connect the legs with a low-temperature soldering paste, a stable and ultralow device electrical resistance (<1 Ω) is achieved, which is unprecedented for wearable textile-based TE devices. The developed prototype demonstrates power generation of up to 3.8 μW using body heat, and it provides a cooling effect of 1 °C for personal thermoregulation. Furthermore, the prototype withstands a tensile strain up to 20%, over 1000 bend cycles (at a 23 mm radius comparable with the curvature of the human wrist), and ten wash cycles, thereby demonstrating viability for TE clothing. Strategies for optimization are also presented to enable further performance enhancements using all textile-compatible processes.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available in the supplementary material of this article.

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