Progress of Triboelectric Nanogenerators with Environmental Adaptivity

As a distributed environmental energy harvesting device, triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) inevitably encounter different and extreme application scenarios, such as environment with high temperature, high humidity, corrosion condition, frequent mechanical stimulus, and physical damages, which resulting in triboelectric performance degradation either by damaging device structure or reducing surface potential, and accelerating dissipation of surface bound charge. Therefore, tremendous efforts are dedicated to improving the TENG performance, enabling devices are competent in sustaining various challenging conditions. This review summarizes and highlights the latest research progress of strategy to achieve TENGs with high environmental adaptivity in three representative application fields of interfacial devices, wearable devices and implantable devices, aiming to gain insights in terms of material selection, structural design, preparation technology, working mode and integration strategy. The future development of the TENG would transform from static to dynamic device that possesses multifunction, high stability, autonomous response and actuation ability to adapt complex application environment. It is hoped that this review article could steer the development of environment-adaptive TENGs to a higher level. Environmental adaptivity is crucial for triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) to manage distributed energy. The review summarizes the latest progress of attachable, wearable, and implantable TENGs in terms of material selection, working modality, structure stability, electrical reliability, mechanical durability, and controllable degradability. TENG with dynamic features would play important role in future, to adapt autonomous function and response requirement in complex environments.image

Automated summary

This review summarizes the latest research progress of achieving triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) with high environmental adaptivity in three representative application fields. It highlights insights in terms of material selection, structural design, preparation technology, working mode, and integration strategy. The future development of TENGs would be focused on creating dynamic devices with multifunctionality, high stability, autonomous response, and actuation ability to adapt to complex application environments.