3 ms·
Pacemakers need a hell of a lot of power for a short amount of time occasionally. To do that you need to store it in something which can be discharged quickly a
by crinkly 1y ago
Pacemakers need a hell of a lot of power for a short amount of time occasionally. To do that you need to store it in something which can be discharged quickly and is low impedance. Which is a capacitor.
This thing generates so little power you couldn’t charge a capacitor up quickly enough or keep one charged with the leakage.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoYou're nothing thinking this through. It could trickle charge a capacitor or supercapacitor that has a very low self-discharge rate. There's a circuit called a Joule Thief that can extract usable power from very low voltage sources. There are other tricks to do voltage multiplication like using diodes and capacitors, but there are also micropower switching boost converters too.
- crinkly 1y agoYes I know this. I’m a qualified EE. Go do the numbers on a supercap with quoted leakage and a decent error margin.
- robin_reala 1y agoYou’re talking about an implantable defibrilator, not a pacemaker?
- crinkly 1y agoNo. The heart is relatively high impedance. You need a low impedance source to drive it even on a trivial basis.