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.

Highlights

  • The ocean, which covers 70% of earth’s surface area, offers a potentially infinite source of renewable energy in the form of waves [1]

  • The frame of the DR-triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) was fabricated by a 3D printer (Cubicon 3DP-310F, Seongnam, Korea) using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS, ABS-A100) filament

  • In comparison to the distance between ABS and Al in the series, PI and Al show a farther distance due to the less negatively charging characteristic of ABS than that of PI

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Summary

Introduction

The ocean, which covers 70% of earth’s surface area, offers a potentially infinite source of renewable energy in the form of waves [1]. The wave energy in the ocean occurs and disappears in the form of potential energy. When this wasted wave energy is effectively harvested, the growing demand for energy could be allocated, and the problem of fossil fuel depletion will be mitigated simultaneously [2,3]. As a demonstration of the ability to harvest energy from the water wave energy, a large-scale harvesting device has already been represented to build structures on the ocean [5,6,7]

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