Teen Invents Palm-Powered Flashlight

By Patti Dobranski 

A 15-year-old winner of the 2013 Google Science Fair was internationally recognized for finding a simple way to harvest clean, surplus energy literally in the palm of her hand.

“Humans are a great source of untapped thermal energy,” said Ann Makosinski, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. “My objective was to make a flashlight that runs solely on the heat of the human hand.”

The teen successfully invented a flashlight that utilizes the thermoelectric effect to generate usable light without batteries. The thermoelectric effect is created when electrons flow between the cool and warm sides of a material and produce a small amount of electricity.

In late September, she won the top prize for “Innovation” in the 15-to-16-year-old category of the Science Fair, which was held in Mountain View, Calif. She beat thousands of other young scientists.

Economical and Enviromentally-Friendly

Makosinski pointed to the age-old fear of discovering dead batteries when a flashlight is desperately needed, along with the environmental threat of improperly discarded batteries, as her motivators.

“Imagine how much money we would save and the amount of toxins leached into the soil… reduced… if we didn’t use batteries in flashlights,” she said.

Since the energy source is essentially endless and always available, her flashlight has dependable, cost-free operation. She acknowledged that while the entire human body was a great source of thermal energy, she could not work with it as a whole and instead concentrated on palm power.

An Idea to Brighten the Future

The thermal flashlight is simply a prototype, Makosinski explained, but definitely a workable idea with impact and potential. Her materials included a hollow aluminum tube, some discounted Peltier tiles she found online, and an ordinary LED.

“The components in my device are quite strong,” she said, noting she was aware production refinements would be made before marketing the product, such as waterproofing or more protective casing.

After some milliwatt calculations and tweaking of voltages and other components, she saw the glow of success.

While the light generated by the thermal flashlight was not enough to illuminate a room, it could definitely help someone find their keys at a darkened doorstep or read a page of a book. Further, the power lasted about a half hour in a 50 degree Fahrenheit environment – pretty impressive for this “handy” prototype!

Makosinski envisions that the mechanics of her invention might be used in the future in other scientific applications such as medical devices.