Teen Girl Designs Flashlight that Runs on Heat of Human Body [VIDEO]

A teenage girl's innovative technique to power flashlights without the use of batteries has given her an edge over thousands of other contestants at the Google Science Fair, she has been selected for the finals.

Fifteen-year-old Ann Makosinski from St. Michaels University School, Canada, came up with an innovative design that she refers to as 'hollow flashlight'. It uses the heat produced by the hands to produce energy, reports CBC News.

The winners of the Google Science Fair will receive a grand prize of $50,000 scholarship from Google including a trip to the Galapagos Islands.

Ann has been submitting her projects to science fairs since Grade 6, and developed a keen interest in harvesting energy from the surrounding environment. During her research on different forms of energy, she learnt about the device, Peltier tiles, which when warm on one side and cool on the other ,generates electricity.

Prior to this project, she worked with Peltier tiles for her seventh grade project. And this time again she tried to use the same technology to design a flashlight that runs without batteries and uses body heat as thermal energy to power the device. On using Peltier tiles in her flashlight design she noticed that it produced sufficient power for the flashlight to produce light through an LED bulb, but didn't have sufficient voltage, reports Science Recorder.

In order to increase the voltage, she tried different circuits to build her own transformers and finally identified the circuit that was missing with the help of an online report.

She came up with two different types of flashlights. In one, she used a slightly different Pelteir tiles and in the other she used an aluminium tube from a lab to pass cool air to the other side of the tile. She noticed that at 40 degree Fahrenheit, the flashlight had a stronger glow when compared to 50 degree Fahrenheit. The difference was due to the air temperature and body heat. In both the temperatures the flashlight could maintain the power for 20 minutes, reports HNGN.

The material required to make the flashlight cost Makosinski just $26, but she believes that this could be lowered if the flashlight is sold commercially.