Ultrahigh sensitive, eco-friendly, transparent triboelectric nanogenerator for monitoring human motion and vehicle movement

Abstract

Natural biomaterials based triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is crucial for sustainable self-powered devices that achieves high outputs, biocompatibility, and reduces the environment impact. Meanwhile, transparent TENG can integrate with commercial optoelectronic devices to simultaneously realize the self-powering sensing and visual transmission of information. Herein, we prepared an eco-friendly, flexible, transparent chitosan@starch composite film by drop casting process, which reveals high transmittance exceed 88% in the visible light range. A transparent TENG was designed by pairing the chitosan@starch composite film with the fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) film, and transparent PET/ITO electrodes. The optimized chitosan@starch-FEP based TENG (CS-F/TENG) exhibits the open-circuit voltage of ∼1080 V, short-circuit current of ∼16.9 mA m−2 and the maximum power density of ∼5.07 W m−2. Ultrahigh sensitivity of 46.03 V kPa−1 in the pressure range of 1.25–6.25 kPa is achieved by the CS-F/TENG as a self-powered force sensor, and its potential applications in monitoring human motion and vehicles’ speed are also demonstrated. Our work provides novel insights in the utilization of sustainable chitosan@starch composite film for transparent wearable TENG with decent output performance, and also facilitates the potential applications of this device in monitoring human motion and vehicle movement.