A cantilever-structure triboelectric nanogenerator for energy harvesting and defect detection via long short-term memory network

The electric signals of cantilever energy harvesting devices with/without a crack were mainly obtained by external sensors, so detecting device damage on a large scale is difficult. To tackle the issue, a cantilever-structure freestanding triboelec-tric nanogenerator (CSF-TENG) device was proposed, which can scavenge ambient energy and act as a self-powered sensor. Firstly, the relation between the peak-to-peak voltage and amplitude of the CSF-TENG was established. Next, the output performance of the CSF-TENG was measured. Then, depending on electric signals output by the CSF-TENG, a cantilever defect identification model was built by using the wavelet packet and long short-term memory (LSTM) algorithms. The experimental results manifest that the accuracy of the model is about 98.6%. Thus, the CSF-TENG with a crack can be detected timely due to its self-monitoring ability, which is of great significance for the develop-ment of self-powered sensor networks.

Automated summary

The study proposes a novel energy harvesting device, CSF-TENG, which can act as a self-powered sensor and detect its own damage. Experimental results demonstrate a high accuracy of the defect identification model for the device.