Turn wasted heat from around your house back into electricity. That’s the simple yet clever idea behind Heat Harvest that Sergey Komardenkov and Vihanga Gore — students from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction — developed during a two-week workshop at IKEA’s Space10 innovation lab. Heat Harvest is a device that can either stand alone or be integrated into household items, such as tables, to capture wasted heat from our everyday objects and turn it into free, green electricity that can be reused at home.
Heat Harvest uses thermoelectricity to capture wasted heat and convert it into electricity. It exploits basic physics, putting to use the fact that temperature differences between two surfaces can generate electricity. Recent developments in nanotechnology have also made the conversion of heat to electricity more efficient than ever.
“We imagine two possible products that use the technology”, says Vihanga. “The first is table tops that extract heat from hot objects that are placed on top of them. These could be anything from a pot of soup to a frying pan straight from the kitchen stove. The second product is heat harvesting pads that you could place beneath TV set top boxes or heat-emitting power adapters anywhere in the home.”
Wireless charging devices are already on the market, meaning that it is now possible to feed wasted heat back into the household’s electricity network and charge the very devices that generated the waste in the first place. It’s an efficient and sustainable solution to our wasteful modern society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ3B68rxkf4
all images and video courtesy of Space10