A highly elastic self-charging power system for simultaneously harvesting solar and mechanical energy

Developing lightweight, flexible and sustainable power sources is desirable and favorable for wearable electronics with the rapid advancement of portable devices. Here, a highly elastic and sustainable power source is fabricated for harvesting and storing energy simultaneously from ambient sunshine and human movement. Flexible fiber-shaped dye-sensitized solar cells are smartly integrated with triboelectric nanogenerators and serve as generating set. The supercapacitors as energy storage devices can store direct current energy for the solar cells and alternating current energy from the triboelectric nanogenerators after rectified at the same time. Furthermore, the supercapacitors are easily integrated with generating set due to the same electrode materials with triboelectric nanogenerators. Due to the all flexible devices, the size of the whole power system can be easily tuned and connected with electronic devices to create self-powered wearable electronics.