Chapter 14 - Advanced self-charging power packs: The assimilation of energy harvesting and storage systems

Abstract

Prodigious worldwide executions of portable/wearable multifunctional electronic gadgets have motivated the researchers to innovate miscellaneous flexible and maintenance-free self-charging power packs by the judicious assimilations of diverse energy harvesters with suitable electrochemical energy storage systems. However, it is definitely challenging to assimilate an energy-harvesting system (piezoelectric/triboelectric nanogenerators and solar cells) with an electrochemical energy storage cell (supercapacitors and batteries) within a solitary power package with greater ambient energy conversion/storage efficiency. Over the past decades, substantial research efforts have been devoted to instigating proficient piezoelectric/triboelectric nanogenerator and photovoltaic cell-driven supercapacitors and battery-based diverse self-charging power packs in order to mitigate the drawbacks of the conventional energy storage systems (e.g., restricted time-spans for discharging and moderate-to-low intrinsic capacities). Besides, repetitive charging and frequent replacements of such energy storage cells are other obstacles for their real-time operations. In this chapter, we will focus on the recent developments of piezoelectric/triboelectric/photovoltaics-driving self-charging supercapacitor/battery-based power systems, rectification-free piezoseparator-driving systems, individual self-charging mechanisms, key approaches to augment their efficiencies/self-charging abilities, and future scopes, succinctly.