Body heat energy driven knitted thermoelectric garments with personal cooling

Wearable, thermoelectric (TE) devices have gained significant interest in recent years as they can both generate output power from converting body heat into electrical energy and be utilized in personal cooling through the Peltier effect. Currently, researched wearable TE cooling devices focus on devices that can be attached to the human body in specific locations and use heat sinks or elongated thermoelectric pillars to increase their effectiveness, making them hard and bulky. In addition, these devices are attached, not integrated, to wearable garments, making their manufacturing a multi-step process. To address this issue, we developed a knitted TE garment through a single-step manufacturing process that offers energy generation and personal cooling capabilities. The functioning of the cooling device was mathematically modelled and analyzed to understand its scalability, optimization, and to show its potential. This garment features excellent thermoelectric generation of 7.48 mV and 0.46 mA on the human body, and the ability to cool the human body up to 1.5 °C. The observations proved that the mathematical model could predict the behavior of the TE device closely. The results showed that the proposed method of knitted TE cooling garment manufacturing is a viable and scalable process.