3D Printed Double Roller-Based Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Blue Energy Harvesting

Abstract

The ocean covers 70% of the earth’s surface and is one of the largest uncultivated resources still available for harvesting energy. The triboelectric energy harvesting technology has the potential to effectively convert the ocean’s “blue energy” into electricity. A half-cylinder structure including rollers floating on the water has already been used, in which the pendulum motion of the rollers is driven by the waveform. For the stable motion of the rollers, the printed surface of the device was treated with acetone for attaining hydrophilicity. The electrical outputs with the proposed device were enhanced by increasing the contact surface area by simply implementing the double roller structure with double side-covered electrodes. With the optimized structure, the maximum power density reached a value of 69.34 µW m−2 at a load resistance of 200 MΩ with the device’s high output durability. Finally, the fabricated device was also applied to the artificial water waves to demonstrate the possibility of using this device in the ocean. By simply modifying the electrode structure and adding a roller, this device demonstrated the ability to generate over 160% of electrical output with the same covered area of the ocean by the triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) and potential ocean application.

Contact-sliding-separation mode triboelectric nanogenerator

“…1(j) and detailed in ESI, † Table S2. 19,21,24,26,37,[39][40][41] These findings confirm that the CSS-TENG delivers outstanding electrical output performance and durability, attributable to its innovative contact-slidingseparation motion. It is worth noting that the CCS-TENG approach to performance enhancement is fundamentally different from the conventional surface microstructure on the triboelectric layer 42,43 and composite power generation models to enhance the electrical output performance.…”

Hybrid Triboelectric‐Electromagnetic Nanogenerator with a Double‐Sided Fluff and Double Halbach Array for Wave Energy Harvesting

“…e) The magnetic field strength between the double Halbach array. f) Comparison of volume power density between this work and other similar works [26,[50][51][52][53].…”

“…Since the b-TENG plays a significant part among the three TENGs. To further investigate the impacting principles of varying weights of the fanshaped pendulum on the TENG outputs, we examined a series [26,[50][51][52][53] of electrical properties of the b-TENG device under varied weights, as shown in Figure 2a. The 1.4 Hz movement frequency is chosen, and the weight of the two-sided fan-shaped pendant rises from 40 to 200 g. The output voltage increases as the counterweight increases.…”

Design of triboelectric nanogenerators featuring motion form conversion, motion rectification, and frequency multiplication for low-frequency ocean energy harvesting

“…Firstly, from the perspective of the TENG generation principle, increasing the contact area of the friction interface is one of the key means to improve the efficiency of TENG generation. In most previous applications of wave energy harvesting and conversion, common models included spherical structures, 25–32 pendulum structures, 33–38 and cylindrical structures, 39–45 to harvest wave oscillation or linear motion energy by using structural instability, e.g. , balls on dynamically inclined surfaces.…”

“…Firstly, from the perspective of the TENG generation principle, increasing the contact area of the friction interface is one of the key means to improve the efficiency of TENG generation. In most previous applications of wave energy harvesting and conversion, common models included spherical structures, [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] pendulum structures, [33][34][35][36][37][38] and cylindrical structures, [39][40][41][42][43][44][45] to harvest wave oscillation or linear motion energy by using structural instability, e.g., balls on dynamically inclined surfaces. Such a structure presents a high response efficiency to external excitation due to the low frictional interface contact area, but at the same time has problems such as low output power density.…”