Flexible carbon cloth-based single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerators with incorporated TiO<mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" id="d1e417" altimg="si2.svg"><mml:msub><mml:mrow/><mml:mrow><mml:mn>2</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:math> nanoparticles
Roman Kruchinin, Yerzhan Nurmakanov, Galymzhan Nauryzbayev, Desmond Adair, Zhumabay Bakenov, Gulnur Kalimuldina
Abstract
Recently, flexible triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have gained significant interest as a promising autonomous technology for harvesting abundant mechanical energy and powering portable electronic devices. In this work, a high-performance flexible single-electrode TENG (SETENG) is presented with a highly conductive carbon cloth (CC) textile electrode and an encapsulating triboelectric material based on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). To increase the generation of triboelectric charges, a rough microtextured surface is implemented on the PDMS friction layer through a simple imprint lithography approach. In addition, the output performance of the prepared SETENG device is further improved by incorporating various concentrations of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles. As a result, flexible [email protected]2-PDMS SETENGs efficiently converts the mechanical energy into electrical power through continuous contact/separation processes caused by the counter tribo-positive friction objects (i.e., human skin, nylon, and cotton fabrics). It was shown that a sample with 5 wt% TiO2, [email protected]%TiO2-PDMS SETENG, achieves the highest output and a sample of 6 × 2.5 cm2 area could charge capacitors (0.1, 1, 10μF) and power 130 LEDs connected in series. Finally, the demonstration of a fully functioning SETENG-powered calculator provides strong evidence of the current maturity of the technology and its excellent potential for self-powered small electronics application.