Spiral Steel Wire Based Fiber-Shaped Stretchable and Tailorable Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Wearable Power Source and Active Gesture Sensor

Abstract

HIGHLIGHTS• Owing to the great robustness, continuous conductivity, and geometric construction of a steel wire electrode, the FST-TENGs demonstrate high stability, stretchability, and even tailorability.• By knitting several FST-TENGs to be a fabric or a bracelet worn on the human body, it enables to harvest human motion energy.• The FST-TENGs can also be woven on dorsum of glove to monitor the movements of gesture.ABSTRACT Continuous deforming always leads to the performance degradation of a flexible triboelectric nanogenerator due to the Young's modulus mismatch of different functional layers. In this work, we fabricated a fiber-shaped stretchable and tailorable triboelectric nanogenerator (FST-TENG) based on the geometric construction of a steel wire as electrode and ingenious selection of silicone rubber as triboelectric layer.Owing to the great robustness and continuous conductivity, the FST-TENGs demonstrate high stability, stretchability, and even tailorability. For a single device with ~ 6 cm in length and ~ 3 mm in diameter, the open-circuit voltage of ~ 59.7 V, transferred charge of ~ 23.7 nC, short-circuit current of ~ 2.67 μA and average power of ~ 2.13 μW can be obtained at 2.5 Hz. By knitting several FST-TENGs to be a fabric or a bracelet, it enables to harvest human motion energy and then to drive a wearable electronic device. Finally, it can also be woven on dorsum of glove to monitor the movements of gesture, which can recognize every single finger, different bending angle, and numbers of bent finger by analyzing voltage signals.

Fiber/Fabric‐Based Piezoelectric and Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Flexible/Stretchable and Wearable Electronics and Artificial Intelligence

“…After further coating with the outer dielectric layer, the energy harvesting fiber is obtained which can also be woven into fabrics (Figure e) . Another example of achieving stretchability is that conductive fiber with built‐in helical structure is inserted into elastic silicone rubber tubes, as illustrated in Figure IV . In addition, energy harvesting fibers made up of stretchable components are also certainly stretchable .…”

Triboelectric Touch‐Free Screen Sensor for Noncontact Gesture Recognizing

“…Recently, triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), based on the coupling of triboelectricity and electrostatic induction, have been quickly developed for harvesting mechanical energy with various advantages of low cost, high output, simple structure, facile fabrication, flexibility, and light weight . TENGs are able to convert irregular mechanical energy from different ambient sources into electricity and they can serve as self‐powered sensors for various mechanical motions, such as touch/pressure sensors, acoustic sensors, vibration sensors, speed sensors, biomedical sensors, and human motion sensors . Furthermore, some recently invented TENGs were found to be able to work under the noncontact operating mode .…”

Flexible Tactile Electronic Skin Sensor with 3D Force Detection Based on Porous CNTs/PDMS Nanocomposites

“…Over past years, wearable and flexible tactile sensors have attracted a great deal of studies due to their great potential in various applications including physiological measurement [1][2][3], robotics [4], human-computer interaction [5,6] and wearable devices [7,8]. Generally speaking, tactile sensors imitate human perception of pressure with capability of detecting shapes and sliding conditions of the contact objects.…”