Water-enabled electricity generation (WEG) technologies
are considered
to be an attractive and renewable approach to meet energy crisis and
environmental pollution globally. However, the existing WEG technologies
still face tremendous challenges including high material cost, harmful
components, and specific environmental requirements. Herein, a high-performance
wood-based moisture-enabled electric generator (WMEG) is fabricated.
Natural wood is cut perpendicular to the tree growth direction and
engineered by simple chemical modification. The obtained bilayer wood
membrane has robust mechanical framework with aligned ion nanochannels,
abundant dissociated functional groups, and spontaneous water adsorption
in the air. At the relative humidity of 85%, one WMEG can generate
a voltage of 0.57 V. The device can also effectively sense biological
water information as a self-powered sensor. The biophile design contributes
a practical moist-electric generation strategy that offers clean energy,
especially for undeveloped and disaster-relief regions where electricity
is limited by high cost or crippled power facilities.
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