A Flexible and Wearable Textile Electrode-Based Single Electrode Triboelectric Nanogenerator

Abstract

Harvesting abundant mechanical energy is considered as one of the promising technologies for the development of autonomous self-powered power units, active sensors, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices [1]. Among various energy harvesting technologies, the triboelectric harvesters based on contact electrification have recently attracted much attention because of their advantages such as high performance, lightweight, and simple design [2]. However, obtaining a high-output performance is still of major concern for many applications.In this work, we proposed flexible and wearable triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) where a highly conductive carbon cloth (CC) textile was utilized as an electrode and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) were used as an encapsulating triboelectric material to construct a single electrode mode TENGs. Further, sandpaper-assisted microtextures were developed on the PDMS surface via a simple soft-imprint lithography technique, and it was employed as a tribo-negative friction layer of TENGs. Moreover, to enhance the output performance of PDMS-based TENGs titania nanoparticles (NPs) were embedded as a function of weight ratio.As prepared wearable single-electrode-mode TENG devices can efficiently convert the mechanical energy into electricity while making continuous contacts/separations with counter tribo-positive friction objects. Fig. 1 shows the charging profile of a 1 µF capacitor by single-electrode TENG. These devices exhibited robust characteristics even after long-term cyclic operations and also generated an electrical output by gently touching with the human hand and were effectively employed as a power source to directly light 130 LEDs. Acknowledgments This work was supported by the research grants AP08052143 “Development of wearable self-charging power unit” from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan and 240919FD3914 “Self-Charging Rechargeable Lithium-ion Battery” from Nazarbayev University.