Abstract
With the rapid progress of artificial intelligence, humans are moving toward the era of the intelligent connection of all things. Therefore, the demand for sensors is drastically increasing with developing intelligent social applications. Traditional sensors must be triggered by an external power source and the energy consumption is high for equipment that is widely distributed and working intermittently, which is not conducive to developing sustainable green and healthy applications. However, self-powered sensors based on triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) can autonomously harvest energy from the surrounding environment and convert this energy into electrical energy for storage. Sensors can also be self-powered without an external power supply, which is vital for smart cities, smart homes, smart transportation, environmental monitoring, wearable devices, and bio-medicine. This review mainly summarizes the working mechanism of TENG and the research progress of self-powered sensors based on TENG about the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, human–computer interaction, and intelligent medical fields in recent years.
Highlights
When two polymer films are in contact and separate from each other for the contact-separation mode, the tribe-charges resulting from contact electrification (CE) cause a potential difference in the interface area and the back electrode, which leads to a current flow if an external load connection exists
In the lateral sliding mode, when two dielectric films are in contact, frictional charges are generated between the two materials, polarization is formed in the horizontal direction, and electrons are driven to flow between the two poles and generate electric current
This study provides a strategy for improving the transmission performance of the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) network in water wave energy harvesting and provides new guidance for building a maritime
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The sensor has the characteristics of a flexible and straightforward structure [21,22,23], a high level of integration, and low cost [24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31] Based on these unique advantages of TENG, the sensor has broad application potential (Figure 1) in the fields of micro/nano energy [32,33,34,35,36,37], self-powered sensing [38,39,40,41,42], high-voltage power supply, [43] and blue energy [44,45,46,47,48,49], and can play a crucial part in solving the problems of energy collection, signal collection, power supply, and energy conversion [50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57]. This review will introduce the latest progress of TENG-based self-powered sensors in smart sensors and medical applications (Figure 2), TENG’s working mechanism, and the basic principles of self-powered sensors
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