Flexible carbon cloth-based single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerators with incorporated TiO2 nanoparticles

Recently, flexible triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have gained significant interest as a promising autonomous technology for harvesting abundant mechanical energy and powering portable electronic devices. In this work, a high-performance flexible single-electrode TENG (SETENG) is presented with a highly conductive carbon cloth (CC) textile electrode and an encapsulating triboelectric material based on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). To increase the generation of triboelectric charges, a rough microtextured surface is implemented on the PDMS friction layer through a simple imprint lithography approach. In addition, the output performance of the prepared SETENG device is further improved by incorporating various concentrations of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles. As a result, flexible CC@TiO2-PDMS SETENGs efficiently converts the mechanical energy into electrical power through continuous contact/separation processes caused by the counter tribo-positive friction objects (i.e., human skin, nylon, and cotton fabrics). It was shown that a sample with 5 wt, CC@5wt-PDMS SETENG, achieves the highest output and a sample of 6 × 2.5 cm2 area could charge capacitors (0.1, 1, 10μF) and power 130 LEDs connected in series. Finally, the demonstration of a fully functioning SETENG-powered calculator provides strong evidence of the current maturity of the technology and its excellent potential for self-powered small electronics application.