Organogel electrode based continuous fiber with large-scale production for stretchable triboelectric nanogenerator textiles

Abstract

Wearable electronics had drawn great attentions in recent years because of their valuable applications in our daily lives. Among them, triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) textile was a promising candidate to alleviate electricity supply problem of wearable electronics. However, currently used electrodes in TENG textile are hard to fulfill the requirements of stretchable electronics. Here, organogel conductor was proposed as electrode to construct triboelectric fiber (GS-fiber), owing to its merits of flexibility, stretchability and conductivity. The core/shell structure GS-fiber was prepared from gel’s photo-crosslinking in transparent silicone hollow fiber, in which hollow fiber was the mold for gel electrode and outer friction layer. The flexibility and solid form of organogel electrode avoided the cracking problem of metallic electrode and leakage problem of liquid electrode in TENG textile, which make GS-fiber a stretchable and tailorable fiber. Moreover, the facile preparation process endowed GS-fiber with large-scale production ability and 30-meter GS-fiber was prepared for demonstration. The GS-fiber was then knitted into TENG textile (GS-teng) for bio-mechanical energy harvesting. This work indicated that organogel electrode has great potential in triboelectric fiber, which was a remarkable progress towards TENG textiles’ industrial application. Organogel conductors were proposed as electrode to construct a new kind of triboelectric fibers (GS-fiber), owing to organogel conductors’ unique merits of flexibility, conductivity and stretchability. The core/shell structure GS-fiber was prepared from gel’s photo-crosslinking in transparent silicone hollow fiber, in which hollow fiber was the mold for gel electrode and outer friction layer of GS-fiber. The flexibility and solid form of organogel electrode avoided the cracking problem of metallic electrode and leakage problem of liquid electrode in textile based TENG, which makes GS-fiber a stretchable and tailorable fiber in processing. Moreover, the facile preparation process endowed GS-fiber with large-scale production ability and 30-meter GS-fiber was prepared for demonstration. The GS-fiber was then knitted into TENG textile (GS-teng) for bio-mechanical energy harvesting. This work indicated that organogel electrode has great potential in triboelectric fiber, which was a remarkable progress towards industrial application of TENG textiles. • Organogel conductor was applied as electrode fiber with stretchability and conductivity. • The prepared triboelectric fiber (GS-fiber) was continuous fiber for large-scale production. • GS-fiber was stretchable and tailorable, which was suitable for textile processing. • The electrode avoided cracking or leakage of metallic or liquid electrode’s problems.