Wearable Thermostat-Invented by the University of California Engineers

The wearable scrap was designed by the engineers of the University of California San Diego. The scrap gives personalized heating as well as cooling at work, home, etc. This scrap was stretchy and soft used to warm the user’s skin to a required temperature and it is named as a wearable thermostat. This can be powered with a stretchable and a flexible battery pack and can be fixed in clothing. This device can reduce the personal thermal comfort once it wears, and it is stated by a professor of mechanical & aerospace engineering namely Renkun Chen at UC San Diego.

We know that there are different kinds of cooling & heating devices available in the market but they are not wearable or movable around. The thermostat can be designed with thermoelectric materials which use electricity for making temperature dissimilarity. These materials are connected to copper electrode strips & placed among two elastomeric sheets.

The elastomeric sheets are designed with rubber material with aluminum nitride powder, high heat conductivity material. When the researchers tested a prototype of scrap by fixed into a net armband. After two minutes, the scrap cooled the skin to a fixed temperature (89.6°F). The tester’s skin was kept at the temperature while the ambient temperature was changed among 71.6°F to 96.8°F.

The scrap moves heat from one sheet to another by using an electric current. When the current supplies across the pillars namely bismuth telluride, it supplies heat with it for causing one face of the scrap to heat up & the face to become cold.

The cooling process can be done by using the heat of the pump from the skin area to the sheet facing externally. Similarly, the heating process can be done by reversing the heat of the pumps in the opposite direction.

The wearable thermostat can be powered with the help of a stretchy battery pack, and it is designed with the set of coin cells which are arranged in spring formed copper wires & fixed within a flexible material.

One scrap uses 0.2 Watts of power and calculates 5X5 cm in dimension. The team of Prof Chen’s estimated 144 patches with 26W of power to make a cooling vest to maintain a separate cool on a normal hot day.