2009 R&D 100 Winner
With no parts to wear out, the Perpetua Power Puck, invented by a team from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Wash., and Perpetua Power Source Technologies, Inc., Corvallis, Ore., is an environmentally-friendly power source able to provide sustained power to small electronic devices. The Power Puck’s technology is based on patent-pending thermoelectric generator (TEG) designs that allow the conversion of ambient thermal energy into electric power for a variety of low-power uses. The core technology uses an assembly of ultra-thin thermocouples in a unique configuration that exploit small (> 2°C) temperature differences occurring naturally in the environment of the application (e.g. ground to air, water to air, or skin to air interfaces). The individual thermocouples, 1-cm high by 1.5-cm wide and a few micrometers thick, are deposited in a linked chain onto a thin, flexible plastic substrate, using sputtered thin-film deposition thermocouples to be assembled into products of all shapes and sizes. These devices generate useful energy from temperature differences as low as 1°C to 2°C while larger temperature differences produce correspondingly larger outputs. The devices can also be designed to work regardless of which thermal side is warmer or cooler.
Technology
Power source
Developers
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Perpetua Power Source Technologies, Inc.
