Manipulating Relative Permittivity for High-Performance Wearable Triboelectric Nanogenerators

Abstract

As the world marches into the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), the practice of human health care is on the cusp of a revolution, driven by an unprecedented level of personalization enabled by a variety of wearable bioelectronics. A sustainable and wearable energy solution is highly desired , but challenges still remain in its development. Here, we report a high-performance wearable electricity generation approach by manipulating the relative permittivity of a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). A compatible active carbon (AC)-doped polyvinylidene fluoride (AC@PVDF) composite film was invented with high relative permittivity and a specific surface area for wearable biomechanical energy harvesting. Compared with the pure PVDF, the 0.8% AC@PVDF film-based TENG obtained an enhancement in voltage, current, and power by 2.5, 3.5, and 9.8 times, respectively. This work reports a stable, cost-effective, and scalable approach to improve the performance of the triboelectric nanogenerator for wearable biomechanical energy harvesting, thus rendering a sustainable and pervasive energy solution for on-body electronics.

Network Topology Optimization of Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Effectively Harvesting Ocean Wave Energy

“…In 2012, Wang's group invented the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) based on contact electrification and electrostatic induction ( Li et al, 2020a , 2020b ; Wang, 2013 ). With the gifted advantages such as simple structure, abundant material options, and low fabrication cost ( Wang, 2014 ; Wang et al., 2015 ; Zhang et al., 2014 ; Zhao et al., 2019 ), the TENGs have made remarkable achievements in the application field of micropower/nanopower sources ( Ahmed et al., 2020 ; Chandrasekhar et al., 2017 ; Deng et al., 2020 ; Jin et al., 2020 ; Liu et al., 2020a ; Lu et al., 2019 ; Quan et al., 2015 ; Šutka et al., 2020 ; Yan et al., 2020 ; Yang et al., 2013 , 2014 ; Zou et al., 2020 ), self-powered sensors ( Bu et al, 2018a , 2018b ; Fu et al., 2017 ; Guo et al., 2018 ; Meng et al., 2020 ; Pang et al., 2015 ; Su et al., 2020a , 2020b ; Wang et al., 2018a ; Zhou et al., 2020b , 2020c ), high-voltage power sources ( Bu et al., 2019 ; Fan et al., 2015 ; Nie et al., 2018 ; Yang et al., 2019a ), and large-scale blue energy ( Chen et al., 2020b ; Liang et al., 2019 ; Rodrigues et al., 2020 ; Xu et al, 2017 , 2018 ; Yang et al., 2019b ; Zhang et al., 2016a ), which is to harvest the low frequency, irregular, and multidirectional water wave energy. Recently, some remarkable works have been developed to improve the performance of TENGs ( Liu et al., 2020b , 2020c ; Wang et al., 2018b ).…”

Wearable Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Therapeutics

“…As an indispensable component of personalized healthcare, the advent of wearable therapeutics has opened the race to develop solutions providing on-demand, continuous, quality, and targeted treatments in a nonclinical environment [12,13]. Here, patients can be treated by personalized telemedicine in the comfort of their homes with the aid of their smartphones, which are particularly important to provide therapeutic insight in chronic diseases such as diabetes [14][15][16][17].…”

Leverage Surface Chemistry for High-Performance Triboelectric Nanogenerators

“…Certainly, this approach also contributes to developing high-performance TENGs with good resistance to the surface wearing issue. Moreover, dielectric property modification is versatile in tailoring a broad range of triboelectric materials since a variety of metalorganic molecules possess high permittivity in most polymer chains (George, 2010 ; Jin et al, 2020 ). With proper selection of dopants and precise control of the dose, dielectric property modification could be a promising approach to improve the output performance of TENGs.…”