Development of flexible self-charging triboelectric power cell on paper for temperature and weight sensing

The recent progresses on smart technology and on Internet of Thing (IoT) have created a huge demand on development of cost-effective and environment friendly alternate energy sources, by using light weight, low cost, flexible and easily available materials. However, in this work, a new type of triboelectric driven flexible and self-charging triboelectric power cell (STPC) has been fabricated by using commercially available materials, namely bulk MoS2, non-conductive glue, graphite powder, and normal sheet of paper. Interestingly, STPC exhibits excellent output performances with the maximum power, open circuit voltage (V-oc), and short circuit current of similar to 0.67 mu W, similar to 3.82V, and similar to 0.20 mu A, respectively under a periodic pressure of amplitude of 1 kPa. The V-oc of the fabricated device is found to be highly sensitive and showed linear response to number of folding (N), externally applied weight (W), and temperature (T). For instance, dV(oc)/dT and dV(oc)/dW of STPC is found to be 0.093VK(-)(1) and 0.2Vkg(-1) in temperature and weight range of 293-323K and 50-72kg, respectively. Further, we have calculated the figure of merit of the developed device by calculating the values of relative sensitivity coefficients (S) of V-oc w.r.t. N, W, and T and the highest obtained values of S are similar to 1.12, similar to 4.35, and similar to 16.00, respectively. The reported simple method of development of paper based STPC cell, based on only commercially available materials, can be utilized further for development of flexible, light weight, low cost and eco-friendly wearable sensing devices.