A flashlight powered by your hand!

Running out of flashlight batteries is one of life’s small irritations. Having a flashlight with dead batteries can be quite a catastrophe, especially if you are in a serious situation.

However, young Ann Makosinski discovered a solution that could put an end to getting left in the dark. The teen from British Columbia has invented a thermoelectric Hollow Flashlight that shines simply from the heat of your hand!

Ann determined that the heat of a person’s palm generates about 57 milliwatts of electricity – this is more than enough for the half of a milliwatt needed to illuminate a flashlight’s LED.

The key to the Hollow flashlight is the Peltier tiles, which generate electricity when one side of the tile is heated and the other is cooled. Ann decided to mount the tiles and the other circuitry inside a hollow aluminum tube, where the air inside the tube would cool one side of the tiles, while heat from the user’s hand would warm the other.

Her invention provided a modest amount of light and worked for a half an hour at a temperature of 50°F.

“The flashlight I have made is more of a prototype than a final product, but the components in my device are quite strong. Of course, if it was to be used and manufactured, I would try to seal off the electronic components in some sort of casing so that it wouldn’t get heavily exposed to the elements, and therefore last longer.” Ann wrote.

The Hollow Flashlight earned Ann a spot at the Google Science Fair in 2013 and her flashlight could change the world!

Here’s her description of her invention in this video.

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