High performance triboelectric nanogenerators based on large-scale mass-fabrication technologies

Recently, people's daily lives are surrounded by microchips, small devices, consumer electronics, smart products, and portable electronics etc. (i.e., microsystem), which significantly improve the quality of human life but also simultaneously bring the energy supply problem. Although the power consumption of microsystem has been reduced dramatically to several Watts, even at mW or mu W levels, the total consumed energy amount is huge from the worldwide macro view point. Meanwhile, this part of power is major supplied by batteries which also caused serious problem of pollution. Therefore, as an essential aspect of the global increasing urgent energy crisis, sustainably powering the low-power-consumption nnicrosystems has attracted so much attention in the past decades. Harvesting energy from the living environment is a promising environment-friendly approach to meet the energy demand of these microsystems, and shows the attractive potential to realize the whole integrated self-powered microsystem. Triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) harvesting living environmental energy based on the triboelectrification effect has been demonstrated to be a reliable energy source since it was firstly reported in 2012, and its unique properties, such as high-output performance, clean, sustainability, etc., result in the explosive growth of TENG research in the past three years. This paper focuses on three main developments of TENG: fabrication technology, performance enhancement and applications, which is illustrated in details based on our research work. Soft lithography process and flexible printed circuit board (i.e., FPCB) process are emphasized as the mass-fabrication technologies to realize the flexible TENG. The large-scale techniques of enhancing the output performance of TENG are summarized as three points, including surface roughening, plasma treatment and folded structure. Moreover, the applications of TENG for the Low-power-consumption devices, including portable electronics, self-powered sensor and biomedical microsystems, are introduced. As a sustainable and green energy source, TENG shows extensively attractive potential in many fields, not only for the academic research but also for the industrial applications. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.