Highly Transparent,Stretchable, and Self‐Healing Ionic‐Skin Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Energy Harvesting and Touch Applications

Recently developed triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) act as a promising power source for self‐powered electronic devices. However, the majority of TENGs are fabricated using metallic electrodes and cannot achieve high stretchability and transparency, simultaneously. Here, slime‐based ionic conductors are used as transparent current‐collecting layers of TENG, thus significantly enhancing their energy generation, stretchability, transparency, and instilling self‐healing characteristics. This is the first demonstration of using an ionic conductor as the current collector in a mechanical energy harvester. The resulting ionic‐skin TENG (IS‐TENG) has a transparency of 92% transmittance, and its energy‐harvesting performance is 12 times higher than that of the silver‐based electronic current collectors. In addition, they are capable of enduring a uniaxial strain up to 700%, giving the highest performance compared to all other transparent and stretchable mechanical‐energy harvesters. Additionally, this is the first demonstration of an autonomously self‐healing TENG that can recover its performance even after 300 times of complete bifurcation. The IS‐TENG represents the first prototype of a highly deformable and transparent power source that is able to autonomously self‐heal quickly and repeatedly at room temperature, and thus can be used as a power supply for digital watches, touch sensors, artificial intelligence, and biointegrated electronics.     

Self-powered pressure sensor for ultra-wide range pressure detection

The next generation of sensors should be self-powered,maintenance-free,precise,and have wide-ranging sensing abilities.Despite extensive research and development in the field of pressure sensors,the sensitivity of most pressure sensors declines significantly at higher pressures,such that they are not able to detect a wide range of pressures with a uniformly high sensitivity.In this work,we demonstrate a single-electrode triboelectric pressure sensor,which can detect a wide range of pressures from 0.05 to 600 kPa with a high degree of sensitivity across the entire range by utilizing the synergistic effects of the piezoelectric polarization and triboelectric surface charges of self-polarized polyvinyldifluoride-trifluoroethylene (P(VDF-TrFE)) sponge.Taking into account both this wide pressure range and the sensitivity,this device exhibits the best performance relative to that of previously reported self-powered pressure sensors.This achievement facilitates wide-range pressure detection for a broad spectrum of applications,ranging from simple human touch,sensor networks,smart robotics,and sports applications,thus paving the way forward for the realization of next-generation sensing devices.Moreover,this work addresses the critical issue of saturation pressure in triboelectric nanogenerators and provides insights into the role of the surface charge on a piezoelectric polymer when used in a triboelectric nanogenerator.