Teen’s “Hollow Flashlight” could bring Light to Third World using Peltier Tiles

It's been a busy past few weeks for 15-year-old science whiz Ann Makosinski. The Victoria, British Columbia teen is garnering plenty of international attention for her hollow flashlight, which operates solely on the warmth of the hand. The invention made her the winner of her age category in last week's Google Science Fair, and has even sparked talks with an interested company. Ann receives a $25,000 scholarship from Google for her education, where in the future she insists she'll definitely be studying science.

Between her TedX speech in Washington and interview with National Geographic, Ann is getting back into the swing of life as a regluar high school student--even as a crew from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation films her during physics class. “Why all the buzz?” asked Amelia Pak-Harvey, who contributed a feature article to The Christian Science Monitor: Ann might have just brought light to the third world. That's one way to describe the battery-free flashlight, which uses Peltier tiles that produce electricity from a difference in temperature. Ann says she got the idea when she noticed one of her friends in the Philippines saw her grades fall because she did not have light to study with at night.

"I know a lot of people around the world have these problems where there's just no light, no electricity, nothing," she told the Monitor. "So I thought, 'Why not try and solve this problem a little step at a time?'" Peltier tiles are a common thermoelectric tool that produce electricity when one side is heated and the other remains cool – a phenomenon called the Seebeck effect. But the catch is keeping one side warm and the other cool, all within the space of only a flashlight.

"I had to somehow take away enough heat from the hand, but I didn't want to take all of it away at once, so I had to find a way to insulate the rest of the hand," she says. Ann says she stuck with an aluminum tube as a sufficient heat sink. "In my case, I heat one side with the palm of my hand and I cool the other side with the ambient air and a hollow aluminum tube," Ann says, "allowing for maximum air convection currents to flow through and around the tube cooling the Peltier tile even further." The complete feature article (with a video) is here.