Thermoharvesting - The Better Energy Source for Today's Wireless Sensor Networks (Energy Harvesting & Storage USA 2010)

Burkhard Habbe is Vice President Business Development at Micropelt. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Munich's Technical University. Starting in automation Burkhard acquired a multi-disciplinary background through technical consultancy, sales and marketing in Software, Video Communications, Automated Microelectronics and Photonics Assembly, Machine Vision and High Speed Video. Today Burkhard develops markets and applications for Micropelt's thin film thermoelectrics, bringing free harvested energy to low power wireless sensors and actuators. He is still very open to discuss other target applications including photonics micro-cooling, rapid thermal cycling, and high speed, high gain thermal sensing

Micropelt GmbH, Freiburg, Germany, develops, produces and markets the world's smallest and most effective thermoelectric elements for clean-tech micro energy harvesting, thermal sensing, cycling and cooling. The company employs 20 staff and currently commissions their first million-unit production facility, also located in Germany.

 

Micropelt's thermoelectric chips are based on a patented, scalable, thin-film, micro-structuring platform technology, which minimizes component size while maximizing power density for energy harvesting, cooling or thermal cycling applications. Process-inherent economies-of-scale break previous cost and price barriers of conventional thermoelectrics. Batteries become obsolete as cost-free electricity from waste heat powers wireless sensor networks for their entire life. Chip-thermogenerators also boast unprecedented sensitivity, resolution and dynamics in sensing heat flux and temperature change.