Gigantic enhancement of electricity generation in piezoelectric semiconductors by creating pores as a universal approach

Abstract

In the Internet of Things era, both self-powered nanodevices and nanogenerators (NGs) that harvest energy from mechanical vibrations are highly attractive, prompting a rapid surge in research on enhancing their performance. We demonstrate a versatile approach for diverse materials, by altering the microstructure with discontinuous nano-pores in one-dimensional nanostructures, which can be readily extended to higher-dimensional single crystal materials, such as epitaxial thin films. This novel approach is demonstrated for two applications, direct-current (DC) NGs and piezotronics, by taking ZnO as a model, where remarkably enhanced performance is demonstrated in theoretical simulations and confirmed by experiments. Here, we report that porous ZnO nanowire based DC-NGs demonstrated ∼23 times enhancement of output performance, and strain-gated transistors exhibited ∼6 times enhancement of force sensitivity. This can potentially augment energy harvesting and pressure sensing for many applications, such as self-powered nano-devices and touch panels.