He has, in essence, built an infrared solar panel. Which is neat for the purposes of demonstrating that all objects emit some level of infrared radiation.
But he cites being able to charge your phone just by having it near your body. Let's see if that checks out.
The human body generates 40-220 watts per square meter from every day activities. Not all of that is going to be emitted as infrared, but let's say it is. Let's say you have a Monothermal device that is the same size as a power bank or smartphone. which according to Reddit is about 12.8 square inches for a 5.8" screen.
Plugging in all the numbers, this would generate 0.33 to 1.817 watts of power, or 0.33 to 1.817 Wh per hour. Smartphones burn through 6-7 Wh minimum, so at some point you have to recharge the phone anyway. Wall chargers and power banks employ much more power and are much more efficient than this set up despite being the same size or smaller.
Your Monothermal device would have to have a surface area of 0.0318 to 0.175 square meters, which are squares with side lengths of 17.8 and 41.8 cm respectively. You could carry those in your backpack, but not your pocket, and now the backpack is going to absorb a lot of that radiation and make the device less efficient.
We've been assuming that Monothermal works at 100% efficiency, which of course is impossible. Solar panels are 25% efficient at most at 25 C, and higher temperatures spell less efficiency. I don't see any reason why Monothermal doesn't behave the same way.
So far Lovell isn't necessarily wrong, just incredibly inefficient. He does go wrong by saying that his device "creates" energy. He may not have meant it that way, but that kind of phrasing has apparently caused multiple free energy communities to latch on to his company as the next energy revolution. As a general rule, when "free energy" types get hyped about something, it turns out to be a dud.
He also goes wrong by saying that his device works without a temperature differential. The photons of infrared released by the human body have to have a higher energy level than the electrons in the device in order for the device to receive energy. Otherwise either no energy transfer would happen at all, or the device itself emits its own infrared and loses energy. Since photon energy levels emitted by black bodies are proportional to that body's physical temperature (which is a decent enough approximation for any room temperature to human temperature object), his device must be stay colder than a human to extract energy from said human. But if it is in contact with the human to get the infrared, it will naturally warm up and rapidly lose its ability to extract useful energy. At best he is imprecise with how he uses scientific terms, at worse he doesn't understand basic concepts of thermodynamics.
His site has a chart detailing how much power Monothermal generates at each ambient temperature, but it does not show who tested it or what methodology they used. Some independent testing from multiple labs or end users would be nice.
At the end of the day, trying to capture and reuse waste energy or ambient heat will only get you so far. No process is 100% efficient; there will always be waste heat no matter what you do. Sometimes waste heat can be put to good use; Teslas use regenerative breaking, and combustion engines use some of their excess heat to heat the air in your cabin when you turn the heater on. But some applications are just too inefficient or impractical for certain use cases. Which is probably why Monothermal hasn't caught on anywhere and all of its testing data is from 20+ years ago.
He has, in essence, built an infrared solar panel. Which is neat for the purposes of demonstrating that all objects emit some level of infrared radiation.
But he cites being able to charge your phone just by having it near your body. Let's see if that checks out.
The human body generates 40-220 watts per square meter from every day activities. Not all of that is going to be emitted as infrared, but let's say it is. Let's say you have a Monothermal device that is the same size as a power bank or smartphone. which according to Reddit is about 12.8 square inches for a 5.8" screen.
Plugging in all the numbers, this would generate 0.33 to 1.817 watts of power, or 0.33 to 1.817 Wh per hour. Smartphones burn through 6-7 Wh minimum, so at some point you have to recharge the phone anyway. Wall chargers and power banks employ much more power and are much more efficient than this set up despite being the same size or smaller.
Your Monothermal device would have to have a surface area of 0.0318 to 0.175 square meters, which are squares with side lengths of 17.8 and 41.8 cm respectively. You could carry those in your backpack, but not your pocket, and now the backpack is going to absorb a lot of that radiation and make the device less efficient.
We've been assuming that Monothermal works at 100% efficiency, which of course is impossible. Solar panels are 25% efficient at most at 25 C, and higher temperatures spell less efficiency. I don't see any reason why Monothermal doesn't behave the same way.
So far Lovell isn't necessarily wrong, just incredibly inefficient. He does go wrong by saying that his device "creates" energy. He may not have meant it that way, but that kind of phrasing has apparently caused multiple free energy communities to latch on to his company as the next energy revolution. As a general rule, when "free energy" types get hyped about something, it turns out to be a dud.
He also goes wrong by saying that his device works without a temperature differential. The photons of infrared released by the human body have to have a higher energy level than the electrons in the device in order for the device to receive energy. Otherwise either no energy transfer would happen at all, or the device itself emits its own infrared and loses energy. Since photon energy levels emitted by black bodies are proportional to that body's physical temperature (which is a decent enough approximation for any room temperature to human temperature object), his device must be stay colder than a human to extract energy from said human. But if it is in contact with the human to get the infrared, it will naturally warm up and rapidly lose its ability to extract useful energy. At best he is imprecise with how he uses scientific terms, at worse he doesn't understand basic concepts of thermodynamics.
His site has a chart detailing how much power Monothermal generates at each ambient temperature, but it does not show who tested it or what methodology they used. Some independent testing from multiple labs or end users would be nice.
At the end of the day, trying to capture and reuse waste energy or ambient heat will only get you so far. No process is 100% efficient; there will always be waste heat no matter what you do. Sometimes waste heat can be put to good use; Teslas use regenerative breaking, and combustion engines use some of their excess heat to heat the air in your cabin when you turn the heater on. But some applications are just too inefficient or impractical for certain use cases. Which is probably why Monothermal hasn't caught on anywhere and all of its testing data is from 20+ years ago.