Issue 46, 2023

Hierarchically spring nanofibrous and wrinkled-structured electrode for highly comfortable wearable triboelectric nanogenerators

Abstract

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), a promising energy harvesting technology, have been rapidly developed in recent years. However, the advancement of wearable electronic devices has led to a demand for power supplies that can be sustainable, require no maintenance, and can stretch. Therefore, we have provided a novel strategy to improve the stretchability of all components of a TENG by using hierarchically wrinkled nanofibers and electrodes. The spring macro-, micro-, and nano-structures of wrinkled nanofibrous nylon 6/6 and hierarchically wrinkled PEDOT:PSS have been obtained using the balloon-blowing technique. Moreover, we have applied a pre-stretch method to simultaneously wrinkle the electrode and triboelectric layer, including hybrid silver nanowires-single-walled carbon nanotubes (AgNWs-SWCNTs) and PET-Lycra. We have fabricated five various TENGs with nanofibrous nylon 6/6 and PET-Lycra as triboelectric layers and PEDOT:PSS and hybrid AgNWs-SWCNTs as electrodes to compare the effect of wrinkles of electrodes and triboelectric layers and the type of electrodes. With optimized material choices and structure design, the textile-based wrinkled stretchable TENG (WS-TENG), consisting of wrinkled nylon 6/6/PEDOT:PSS obtained by the balloon-blowing method and wrinkled PET-Lycra/AgNWs-SWCNTs fabricated simultaneously by a pre-stretch technique, has the best performance. We also studied the effect of pressure and frequency on the open-circuit voltage of this WS-TNEG. Furthermore, we evaluated the influence of resistance on the voltage, current, and power density of the WS-TENG. We applied this WS-TENG to harvest charges generated by hand-tapping and charged a capacitor, which powered a commercial LED. Additionally, we evaluated the ability of harvesting charges generated by WS-TENG in different capacitors. This fully wrinkled stretchable TENG is capable of harvesting energy from human motions with low frequency and powering electronic devices.

Graphical abstract: Hierarchically spring nanofibrous and wrinkled-structured electrode for highly comfortable wearable triboelectric nanogenerators

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
19 avq 2023
Accepted
09 okt 2023
First published
06 noy 2023

J. Mater. Chem. A, 2023,11, 25441-25454

Hierarchically spring nanofibrous and wrinkled-structured electrode for highly comfortable wearable triboelectric nanogenerators

M. Haghayegh, R. Cao, F. Zabihi, R. Bagherzadeh, Yue-E. Miao, S. Yang and M. Zhu, J. Mater. Chem. A, 2023, 11, 25441 DOI: 10.1039/D3TA04988D

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