Fiber-Based Triboelectric Nanogenerators

Abstract

With the fast-growing demand for flexible and wearable electronics, fibers show great application prospects in this multidisciplinary area due to its breathability, washability, flexibility, and lightweight. Combining its advantages with the newly developed triboelectric nanogenerator technology, wearable biomotion energy harvesting, and multifunctional self-power sensors play an increasingly important role in this coming intelligent era. This technology is to utilize low frequency mechanical energy from dailylife mechanical motions to large-scale seawave energy. Based on the common triboelectric effect, electricity would be generated out of physically manipulating two materials with opposite surface charges. Simply by walking or running, the output current is enough to power sensors, microcontrollers, memories, arithmetic logic units, displays, and even wireless transmitters. Fiber TENGs are expected to both work as convenient energy harvesters to supply wearable electronics and directly work as self-powered real-time wearable sensors to monitor personal healthcare and bio-motions. Through textile method, fibers are also fabricated to into fabric and textile TENGs which makes the harvesting energy a higher amount level with more efficient area and could perform as a multifunctional cloth itself. In this chapter, we will introduce this emerging technique from the basic working principles, and the thoughts of device designs, to the versatile applications as energy harvesters and self-powered sensors. For remaining challenges to face both for energy harvesting textile TENG and TENG sensors, we will discuss and provide some practical insights and viewpoints.