Abstract
Bio-inspired technologies have remarkable potential for energy harvesting from clean and sustainable energy sources. Inspired by the hummingbird-wing structure, we propose a shape-adaptive, lightweight triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) designed to exploit the unique flutter mechanics of the hummingbird for small-scale wind energy harvesting. The flutter is confined between two surfaces for contact electrification upon oscillation. We investigate the flutter mechanics on multiple contact surfaces with several free-standing and lightweight electrification designs. The flutter driven-TENGs are deposited on simplified wing designs to match the electrical performance with variations in wind speed. The hummingbird TENG (H-TENG) device weighed 10 g, making it one of the lightest TENG harvesters in the literature. With a six TENG network, the hybrid design attained a 1.5 W m−2 peak electrical output at 7.5 m/s wind speed with an approximately linear increase in charge rate with the increased number of TENG harvesters. We demonstrate the ability of the H-TENG networks to operate Internet of Things (IoT) devices from sustainable and renewable energy sources.
Highlights
Bio-inspired and biomimetic engineering has illustrated strong potential in enhanced design performance in multiple scientific fields due to unique Multiphysics within the hierarchy of biological structures and organisms[17,18]
The H-triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) consists of a metal (Al) and an insulator (Fluorinated Ethylene Propylene, FEP) structure in contact
A functional TENG is developed for wind energy harvesting through an innovative hummingbird wing-inspired design
Summary
Abdelsalam Ahmed 1, Islam Hassan[1,2], Peiyi Song[3], Mohamed Gamaleldin[4], Ali Radhi[1], Nishtha Panwar[3], Swee Chuan Tjin[3], AhmedY. Inspired by the hummingbird-wing structure, we propose a shape-adaptive, lightweight triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) designed to exploit the unique flutter mechanics of the hummingbird for small-scale wind energy harvesting. In a bio-inspired TENG model, researchers developed a wireless sensor network (WSN) for enhanced hydrokinetic energy conversion from water-contacted TENGs using a duck-shaped harvester for superior stability[35]. In another example, TENGs were arranged in forest-like arrays of lawn on rooftops to exploit upcoming wind at a multitude of force scales[45]. The Keithley 6514 probes were placed on the capacitor, and the output voltage was measured
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