Investigated a PLL surface-modified Nylon 11 electrospun as a highly tribo-positive frictional layer to enhance output performance of triboelectric nanogenerators and self-powered wearable sensors

Abstract

Although the development of self-powered triboelectric sensors (TES) is growing very rapidly, fabricating ultra-flexible, highly sensitive, lightweight and energy-sustained TES remains a tremendous challenge. Here, we report a facile poly-L-lysine (PLL) post-surface-modification technique to enhance the positive polarity of Nylon 11 electrospun membranes for the first time. Ecoflex was used as the tribo-negative layer of the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). The effect of the Nylon 11 electrospun membrane with PLL modification (PNy11) used as the positive layer was compared with the experimental results of the membrane without PLL modification (Ny11). The triboelectric output performances of open circuit potential and short circuit current significantly increased by more than five times (from 26 to 137 V) and four times (from 0.8 to 3.4 µA) for PNy 11. Further, various dielectric materials (MXene and SrTiO3 with different wt%) were incorporated into the Ecoflex counter layer to minimize the triboelectric loss and enhance the triboelectric performance. The 10 wt% SrTiO3-embedded Ecoflex (EC10S) and PNy 11 pair showed maximum triboelectric performance (270 V and 7.2 µA) at a working load of 8.5 N than others. The optimized EC10S+PNy 11 TENG showed a power density of 2 Wm−2, which is sufficient to operate low-power electronics. Furthermore, the proposed EC10S+PNy 11 wearable triboelectric sensor (without spacer) exhibits high shape adaptability with a sensitivity of 9 V.Pa−1 due to the imported micro-nano hierarchical roughness on the frictional layers. The proposed idea with excellent performance is expected to show great potential for use in the field of wearable electronics.