Fabrication And Related Applications Of Triboelectric Nanogenerators And Sensors

Energy and information technology are related to the development of our society.It is essential to develop sustainable energy due to the increasing energy crisis.Besides,with the speedy growth of Internet of Things,sensors will deeply affect all aspects of our life.Fortunately the triboelectric nanogenerators(TENGs)can harvest energy from the environment effectively,especially a huge number of energy in the ocean,which will fill the huge gap of the energy.Meanwhile TENGs could also be used as sensors,which are self-powered.We present the design and application of new energy technologies based on TENG and various types of sensing devices.We designed a novel type of nanowires modified TENG to transfer the mechanical energy from the ocean to electrical energy.It is cheap,chemically stable,light in weight and small in size,comparing with the heavy and expensive shortcomings of traditional electromagnetic generators.It can collect low-frequency energy when the ocean flows slowly,in which conditional the traditional electromagnetic generator could not work effectively.The nanowires modified on the TENG will largely increase the contact surface and then enhance the output performance by 2-3 times.The energy collected by the TENG has many applications,for example preventing the metal corrosion in the marine environment.The economic damage caused by corrosion can up to 1 trillion.We designed different structures of TENGs for protecting the metal corrosion.The best output of the TENGs is 10?A and 200 V.In addition,numerous TENGs are fabricated to form a network to largely increase the output performance,and they can reduce 80% of the metal corrosion.TENGs are not only energy collectors,but also can be used as sensors.Here we design a TENG based motion tracking sensor.It is self-powered and can detect speed,acceleration,moving direction,starting position,ending position and other physical signals.Meanwhile,it can accurately detect the speed of walking,biking and cars in our life.We also present a flexible silicon based pressure sensor.The p-type Si wire arrays with different lengths can be fabricated by etching and then form the LED arrays with an n-type ZnO nanofilm.The LED array device can be transferred from the Si substrate.Therefore,a flexible LED array device made of Si-Microwires-ZnO-Nanofilm,with the advantages of flexibility,stability,light weight,and energy savings,is fabricated and can function as a strain sensor to demonstrate the two-dimensional pressure distribution.The flexible LED's intensity can be increased more than 3 times(under 60 MPa compressive strains)through piezo-phototronic effect.Additionally,the device is stable and energy saving.The flexible device can still work well after 1000 bending cycles or 6 months putted in the atmosphere,and the power supplied to the flexible LED array is only 8% of the power of the surface-contact LED.The promising Si-based flexible device has wide range application and may revolutionize the technologies flexible screens,touchpad technology and smart skin.We provide a novel method for harvesting the blue energy from the ocean and design various types of sensing devices,which can be widely used in energy,corrosion preventing,motion tracking sensing,pressure sensing and defense.