Abstract
By seamlessly integrating the wearing comfortability of textiles with the biomechanical energy harvesting function of a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), an emerging and advanced intelligent textile, i.e., smart textile TENG, is developed with remarkable abilities of autonomous power supply and self-powered sensing, which has great development prospects in the next-generation human-oriented wearable electronics. However, due to inadequate interface contact, insufficient electrification of materials, unavoidable air breakdown effect, output capacitance feature, and special textile structure, there are still several bottlenecks in the road towards the practical application of textile TENGs, including low output, high impedance, low integration, poor working durability, and so on. In this review, on the basis of mastering the existing theory of electricity generation mechanism of TENGs, some prospective strategies for improving the mechanical-to-electrical conversion performance of textile TENGs are systematically summarized and comprehensively discussed, including surface/interface physical treatments, atomic-scale chemical modification, structural optimization design, work environmental control, and integrated energy management. The advantages and disadvantages of each approach in output enhancement are further compared at the end of this review. It is hoped that this review can not only provide useful guidance for the research of textile TENGs to select optimization methods but also accelerate their large-scale practical process.
Highlights
Orderly energy supply modes can provide a part of the power for distributed electronic devices, the rest of the power must be provided by random energy sources in our living environment, including solar energy, vibration, motion, wind energy, and other resources [3–9]
The results show that compared with the traditional PTFE-based hard contact electrode, the maximum output charge of the soft contact spherical triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is increased by 10 times
Is in a separated state, the reverse current direction will cause the connection state of the ceramic capacitor to change from parallel to series, which will result in more charges to transfer from the ceramic capacitor to the TENG with almost zero voltage
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. With the merits of lightweight, cost-effectiveness, universal availability, abundant materials choice, and especially high conversion efficiency at low frequency, TENGs exhibit a great application prospect in wearable emergency power supply, multifunctional self-powered sensors, healthcare apparatus, and artificial intelligence [25–35]. The low power density and high internal impedance are still the two main factors that hinder the effective commercial utilization of textile TENGs. The maximum energy output per cycle has a quadratic relationship with the charge density of the triboelectric surface and is positively correlated with the average output power and energy conversion efficiency of TENGs. According to Paschen’s law, the breakdown effect of high-pressure air has a great influence on the maximum surface charge density [48].
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