Underwater communication is a critical and challenging issue, on account of the complex underwater environment. This study introduces an underwater wireless communication approach via Maxwell’s displacement current generated by a triboelectric nanogenerator. Underwater electric field can be generated through a wire connected to a triboelectric nanogenerator, while current signal can be inducted in an underwater receiver certain distance away. The received current signals are basically immune to disturbances from salinity, turbidity and submerged obstacles. Even after passing through a 100 m long spiral water pipe, the electric signals are not distorted in waveform. By modulating and demodulating the current signals generated by a sound driven triboelectric nanogenerator, texts and images can be transmitted in a water tank at 16 bits/s. An underwater lighting system is operated by the triboelectric nanogenerator-based voice-activated controller wirelessly. This triboelectric nanogenerator-based approach can form the basis for an alternative wireless communication in complex underwater environments.
In situ fabrication of metal nanostructures such as metal nanoparticles (NPs) and nanoclusters (NCs) in supramolecular gels (particularly hydrogels) is important for the construction of novel and promising bio-/chemosensing platforms, and catalytic and antibacterial functional materials, because of their intriguing properties. Reported herein are our recent findings, in which we employed sodium salts of a series of structurally similar bile acid derivatives (BAs) to construct supramolecular hydrogels incorporating various metal ions including Ag + and Au 3+ , and to investigate the feasibility of in situ fabrication of Ag NPs and Au NPs in these supramolecular hydrogel systems via a simple and environmentally friendly method of photoreduction, without adding any external reducing or stabilizing agents. These results demonstrated that the gelation ability of BAs induced by the coordination of M n+ could also be tuned by a slight structural alteration of BAs, and forming Ag or Au NPs as effective nodes could facilitate increasing strength of the resulting supramolecular hydrogels. This is the first reported supramolecular hydrogel system capable of in situ formation of both Ag NPs and Au NPs, expected to open an entry for preparing novel functional gel materials incorporating metal nanostructures for numerous potential applications.
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