Fully Biodegradable Triboelectric Nanogenerators Based On Electrospun Polylactic Acid And Nanostructured Gelatin Films

With the development and progress of human society,the way of using energy is increasing.However,the current use of various energy sources will cause various kinds of pollution.Therefore,a new energy source is needed urgently to solve this problem.With the rapid development of wireless sensor networks,portable electronic devices and implantable devices,people are committed to the development of sustainable energy.There is a need for new technologies to convert the ubiquitous mechanical energy in our living environment to energy for electronic devices.Static electricity and Tribological electricity are common phenomena in our life.But they are very small and difficult to collect and use,so they haven’t attracted enough attention before.If we can use a device to collect the trace energy which is common in human microenvironment,it will have an important impact on the current energy structure..At present,the Wang Zhonglin research group has studied the friction nanoscale generator based on the charging effect of the friction electric potential.TENGs are developed from the combination of contact electrification and electrostatic induction.Generally,chemical bonds are formed between some parts of the surfaces when two kinds of materials contact with each other,and triboelectric chargesare generated due to the charges transfer from one surface to the other in order to equalize electrochemical potential.The relative motion between triboelectrically-charged surfaces driven by applied force induces periodically varied potential in the TENGs.Under short circuit conditions,alternating electric current flows through the load and the electrostatic equilibrium between two electrodes is kept.Most of the current TENG are not biodegradable,a small number of the TENG with biodegradability but the performance is not enough as a power resource only as a self powered sensor,at the same time,with the rapid development of nanotechnology,there are a lot of energy can be used for supporting devices,implantable biological systems need to provide nano devices its energy,most of the external power supply and battery because of its size,post processing and other reasons is not suitable for the application in implant field,so the development of a high performance,harmless,and nano energy supply system matching the implanted nano devices is of great significance.In order to solve the above problems,this paper uses the theory of Triboelectric Nanogenerators(TENG),we present a fully biodegradable triboelectric nanogenerator(BD-TENG)based on gelatin film and electrospun polylactic acid nanofiber membrane.By optimizing the material properties of the gelatin and PLA polymer films,a good output performance is achieved.Performance of the BD-TENGs under various material and test conditions are investigated and analyzed.Biodegradation experiments show that all the materials of the TENG could be degraded completely into water.The BD-TENGs provide a promising green micro-power source for environment monitoring,biomedical implants through harvesting energy from wind,heart motion et al,yet they can dissolve with no adverse effect to environment or human body.This is also the innovation of this article.