Environmentally friendly agar‐agar biomaterial‐based triboelectric nanogenerator for sustainable electronics

Abstract For the development of advanced technologies, sustainable materials are getting much attention to develop self‐powered devices/battery‐free technology. Considering the need for environmental friendliness and sustainability, we have developed the agar‐agar biomaterial‐based triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) device in the present work. The triboelectric properties of the agar‐agar biomaterial have been studied and demonstrated their tribopositive behavior. Initially, different electronegative layers, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) were tested together with agar‐agar biomaterial for TENG application. The agar‐agar/PTFE TENG device exhibited excellent output performance (open circuit voltage 656 V, current 35 μA, and instantaneous power 3307 μW (per unit area: 275.58 μW/cm 2 )) as compared with agar‐agar/PET and agar‐agar/PDMS TENG devices. The area and frequency‐dependent studies were carried out for agar‐agar/PTFE TENG devices. In the present case, 4 × 3 cm device size and 4 Hz frequency conditions show outstanding device performance. From the applications point of view, low‐power electronic devices (LEDs and calculator) were operated with optimized agar‐agar/PTFE TENG devices. These results suggested that the agar‐agar/PTFE device is an excellent candidate to develop sustainable energy technology.