Building
an intelligent interface between plants and the environment
is of paramount importance for real-time monitoring of the health
status of plants, especially promising for high agricultural yield.
Although the advancement of various sensors allows automated monitoring,
developing a sustainable power supply for these electronic devices
remains a formidable challenge. Herein, a waterproof and breathable
triboelectric nanogenerator (WB-TENG) is designed based on poly(vinylidene
fluoride-co-hexafluoropropylene) (PVDF-HFP) nanofibers
embedded with fluorinated carbon nanotubes (F-CNT) microspheres, which
was realized by simultaneous electrospinning and electrospraying,
respectively. Using carbon nanotubes (CNT) as the electrode, the WB-TENG
shows micro-to-nano hierarchical porous structures and high electrostatic
adhesion, exhibiting a high output power density of 330.6 μW
cm–2, breathability, and hydrophobicity. Besides,
the WB-TENG can be conformally self-attached to plant leaves without
sacrificing the intrinsic physiological activities of plants, capable
of harvesting typical environmental energy from wind and raindrops.
Results demonstrate that the WB-TENG can serve as a sustainable power
supply for a wireless plant sensor, enabling real-time monitoring
of the health status of plants. This work realizes the concept of
constructing a plant compatible TENG with environment adaptivity and
energy scavenging ability, showing great potential in building a self-powered
agriculture system.
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